In Love and War

1

Esmond wakes to the sound of a bell. He pokes one leg out of bed, then another, hops across tiles to find his dressing-gown and opens the shutters. Watery sunlight falls down on the via Tornabuoni below. There is a church opposite. Old ladies move nimbly up the steps and lean through heavy doors. Cars weave between pony traps, mules, bicycles on the cobbles. A black cat laces along the pavement, licks a patch of fur clean, rubs herself against the wall.

Esmond puts on his watch. It is almost eight. Dear Philip, he’d written on a sheet of letter paper before bed. He pulls out the chair, sits at his desk, writes I miss you and hears a light knock at the door.

Harold Goad, the Director of the British Institute, stands in the hallway in brisk tweed, the sound of crockery and the smell of coffee behind him. ‘I thought you might need these.’ He lifts an armful of books to his chest. ‘Something to read when you’re woken by the bells of San Gaetano. Ugliest church in Florence, I’m afraid.’ They exchange their first smile. ‘I’m an early riser,’ Goad adds. ‘I like to walk in the city while it’s still quiet. But I’ve waited for breakfast.’

Esmond takes the books. There is a Baedeker, a thick Italianto-English dictionary, a thicker Decameron, a Modern Library copy of A Room With a View and one of Goad’s own, The Making of the Corporate State. ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ he says. ‘I love Forster. And I’ll look forward to reading this.’ He holds up Goad’s book. ‘My father says you’re the one true Fascist intellectual.’

‘Decent of him.’ Goad’s cheeks flush a little. ‘Splendid fellow, Sir Lionel. Now — hum — we eat breakfast in the kitchen. Nothing too grand, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll be along shortly.’

At his desk, Esmond thinks how the Forster, particularly, would bother his parents. The day of his ignominious return from university he’d found gaps like missing teeth in his bookshelves. Nightwood was gone and Ulysses and all his Forster, and he’d looked down to see his mother feeding book after book into the flames of a bonfire in the field below. She liked her novels like her evenings — light and mannered and smelling faintly of horses; his were fishy and, like Cambridge, to be struck from record.

He dresses, reaching past the stiff twill of the uniform he’d slipped out of the night before, arriving at the Institute late, in the rain, and following Goad up the stairs to the apartment on the third floor. Now he steps out into the corridor, breathing the rich, gloomy air. He closes the door, straightens his tie, and makes for the kitchen.

2

Goad is sitting at a white formica table with a pile of newspapers in front of him: La Nazione, The Times, The Italian Mail. ‘Have a seat, have a seat,’ he says. ‘Gesuina, vi presento Esmond Lowndes. Esmond, this is Gesuina.’

A lean woman in her fifties turns to Esmond with a quick curtsey.

‘Molto piacere, Signor Lowndes.’

‘How d’you do.’ Then, ‘Lei ringrazio,’ as she places a coffee cup in front of him.

‘And that’s one thing you should know,’ Goad raises his finger. ‘Mussolini has banned the use of lei as the formal pronoun. Considers it unmanly. You must use voi, d’you see?’

Esmond nods and pours himself coffee.

‘You can be arrested for using lei.’

Gesuina brings toast and jam. Goad reads, occasionally stopping to snip out an article, inspect it, and place it in an envelope. He tuts, stirring his coffee.

‘It’s a bad business in Spain, I’m afraid,’ he says, folding The Times. ‘The Falangists have taken an awful beating. Italians dead on both sides. Mussolini shouldn’t have begun so soon after Abyssinia, not with the sanctions.’

Esmond shakes his head. ‘I’ve been reading up on persistent oscillators and free radiators.’

‘Of course, the wireless. We should have a chat. I could have arranged it myself, of course, but the technology terrifies me rather. Electricity is for the young. Why don’t we meet in my study in — hum — half an hour? I need some time after breakfast to allow my digestion to activate. I’m afraid I’m not terribly well. I imagine your father might have told you.’

Goad stands, bows at Gesuina and leaves. After a few minutes of failing to make sense of the front page of La Nazione, Esmond gets up from the table and places his plate and coffee cup in the sink, where Gesuina tuts away his attempts to wash them. He walks past his room, past the door Goad had identified as his, and to large, grey-stone stairs.

The apartment is three sides of the top floor of the Institute, the fourth a columned loggia where sheets hang and clothes horses perch on stone benches, draped with shirts and assorted underwear. Esmond notices with interest three small, white brassieres. He makes his way down the steps to the library.

Armchairs are scattered between tables of journals and ashtrays. Bookshelves line every wall save a large tarnished mirror over the fireplace. Dust and memory in the air. He crosses to the window and looks downwards. The ground floor of the palazzo is given over to offices, including the Florentine branch of Thomas Cook where, Goad had explained, the expats pick up letters, make telephone calls and arrange for goods to come or go home. Already there is a queue out of the door and into the courtyard. An old fellow with a military moustache glances up, raises his hat with one hand and gives Esmond the thumbs-up with the other. He smiles and returns it. Goad had warned him that new taxes for foreigners, anti-English sentiment in Florence and the weakening pound have meant a steady stream of departures. ‘You have arrived’, he’d said, ‘just as everyone is leaving.’

3

Goad’s desk seems to have been chosen for its vastness. His present task, gluing cuttings into a scrapbook by the light of a brass desk lamp, is taking place in a small province of it. He looks slighter than the bust of Shelley behind him.

‘If I don’t do it first thing, it never gets done,’ he says. ‘With you in a moment.’

Esmond sits in the armchair by the fireplace and examines the bookshelves. Poetry, mostly Italian: d’Annunzio, Foscolo, Ungaretti, Quasimodo. Essays on Shakespeare. An entire shelf of Norman Douglas. He’d read Philip’s copy of South Wind on the grass by the Cam at Newnham. He spots T. E. Hulme’s Speculations and thinks of his own attempt at a novel, the fifty-five pages he’d scratched out in his study at Emmanuel, smouldering with the rest on the lawn at home. Even with the embarrassment of his expulsion, those pages had felt like the future. Philip had called it modern and thrilling. Hulme had been his father’s friend at university, his comrade in the war. Now he, and the book, were lost.

‘Now then — hum.’ Goad is opening drawers and clicking his tongue. ‘Here we are.’ He holds up a single sheet of writing-paper. ‘A letter from Il Duce — his blessing to your project. He was much taken with the idea, suggests we name it Radio Firenze — what d’you think?’

Esmond smiles uncertainly.

‘They’ve been doing everything they can to expunge the English language from the Italian consciousness, renaming the Bristol, the Old England Shop, Eden Park Villas, but Mussolini is shrewd enough to realise it’s still the language of business. A Fascist wireless programme! Showing that even the English are coming round to his way of seeing the world is — hum — two birds, one brick. Jolly good idea of Sir Oswald’s, I must say.’

Esmond stands to take the letter. BenitoMussolini is written without spaces, the final ‘i’s staring above a sulking ‘n’. The text — from what he can make out — is plain as a doctor’s note, but he can imagine the power of that signature. He folds the letter and holds it.

‘This is super,’ he says.

‘He’s an interesting man. A brute, yes, but a poet, too. Everyone knows about his railways — although, in fact, those achievements have been overstated in the British newspapers. It’s more that — hum — he has recast the Italian narrative. He has taken the history of the nation, which, remember, is barely seventy-five years old, and made it a myth, the myth of the Patria. Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the Risorgimento—’

Esmond notices that Goad’s hands, when they meet the light, are lurid red with a white scurf of skin flaking at the knuckles, which he pauses to scratch.

‘Nervous eczema, I’m afraid. Too much work. I keep trying to resign, but they simply won’t let me. I feel as if I’m single-handedly putting right the — hum — psychological atmosphere between the British and the Italians. Lord Lloyd has granted a very generous sum to expand the Institute’s operations across Italy, but I’m afraid it’s unlikely my health will be up to it.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’

‘Can’t be helped. I only hope I last long enough to see an end to this silly bitterness.’ Goad’s eyes smile behind his spectacles. ‘Of course, you’ll want to get out and explore these many-memoried streets and galleries and churches, as my friend described Florence.’

‘You knew Henry James?’

‘Oh yes. And Lawrence, of course. Huxley stayed in your room, you know.’

Esmond looks around for the right words. ‘And I see you’re an admirer of Norman Douglas.’

Goad’s face clouds a little.

‘Hum. Douglas. I’m sure you’ll come across him while you’re here. Gerald — my son — enjoys his work. I am not convinced. His novels feel to me like essays padded with sub-Wildean quips and louche philosophy. I buy his books in hope that — hum — bankruptcy doesn’t join the many other scandals his lifestyle calls down upon him. He sells them himself, quite shamelessly, you know. Every musical recital or lecture at the Institute, he’ll be here, cadging his latest like a tinker. Frightfully expensive and badly printed, but what can one do?’

‘I’d love to meet him.’

‘That could be arranged.’ Goad taps his fingers on the desk. ‘Now, what else? You’re to see the Podestà, the mayor, at his office at nine-fifteen tomorrow morning. He’ll introduce you to the wireless expert, Mario Carità. He’s a rogue, but he knows his transmission coil from his— well. Runs an electrical shop just behind Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. Strictly between us, I think the Podestà is hoping that this project will limit some of Carità’s — hum — enthusiasms. He’s in charge of the MVSN, the voluntary police force, and has been rather too rigorous in addressing anti-Fascist feeling.’

‘I see.’

‘Your father has established an account for you at the Monte dei Paschi bank. Ten thousand lire to get Radio Firenze started and an allowance of fifty a week. Should be more than enough.’ He takes an envelope from a drawer and passes it across the desk. ‘Here’s a couple of weeks in advance and a chequebook to draw against the bank. Now—’ Goad rubs his hands again, making a small haze of skin in the light of the lamp. ‘There’s the matter of the broadcasts themselves. Sir Oswald has kindly sent out a selection of his speeches recorded onto disc. I think initially it would suffice for me to give a brief introduction to each in Italian, and perhaps a short commentary at the end. And once the station is up and running, when there’s an audience, we can see about advertisers, sponsorship, making the thing pay for itself.’

‘Fine. Thank you.’

‘Not at all. I’m thoroughly excited. Haven’t felt this bucked since my fourth edition. And of course when your own Italian is abbastanza fluido — it’s a very easy language, you know — you’ll be able to take over the broadcasts yourself. You should start thinking about which subjects you’d like to discuss.’

‘Shall I be having lessons?’

‘Let’s see how you get on with Carità. There’s nothing like learning a language from a native, so to speak. I’ve never had a lesson in my life, French, German or Italian. If Carità is worth his salt, he’ll teach you as you go.’

Esmond half-stands but Goad speaks again, staring down at his hands.

‘Since my wife died, I haven’t ventured out all that much. When Gerald’s here he has his own friends, his own — hum — bustle.’

‘Does he get out here often?’

‘Not half as much as I’d like, I’m afraid. He’s studying for the Bar and rather floats around London. His mother’s death touched him very sorely. On the right track now, I think. Imagine he’ll be back at some point over the summer, but his movements are — hum — irregular.’

Goad crosses his study and opens the door.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t arranged an office, a studio. I’ve been so terribly busy with the start of term. Anyway, there’s no rush. Make the most of this time, get to know the place. Use your Baedeker discreetly. What else? Steer clear of the Blackshirt squadristi and for goodness’ sake salute back if they salute you — arm straight up, Roman style, not like the British Union. And enjoy yourself. It’s delightful to have another young person in the building.’

4

Esmond sits on the window-ledge in his room, smoking. He has three cartons of British Union cigarettes in his trunk and feels a sudden surge of fondness for the Party, turning over a black packet and running his thumb over the lightning bolt and golden hoop. Three Blackshirts strut past on the street below, their heels ringing on the cobbles, their yellow fezzes at loose tilts. He watches the crowd outside Caffè Casoni part for them. Grinding out his fag in the ashtray at his bedside, he picks up his panama, forces a pocketbook of wide Italian banknotes into his jacket, steps into the corridor and runs for the stone stairway.

The courtyard is empty now. It is almost eleven when he walks through the entrance-hall of the palazzo, past a large portrait of the late King George and onto the street. The traffic has died down, the rainwater drained from the road. A tramp with a pheasant feather in his cap sits on the steps of San Gaetano, scattering crumbs for the pigeons. Moustachioed men walk arm-in-arm with girls in lace chiffon. Older couples step down from taxis outside Doney’s café, its name in gold on frosted windows. Roberts’ British Pharmacy, apparently not yet drawing Anglophobic ire, advertises quinine pills and Fleischmann’s Yeast. Next door, Pretini the hairdresser waves a white-gloved hand at Esmond through the window. He comes to the intersection where the via Tornabuoni meets the vias Strozzi and Spada.

At a table on the pavement, sipping a spumey cappuccino, is the man Esmond had seen queuing for Cook’s. Esmond raises his hat and the old man lets out a whinny. ‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Is it so obvious I’m English?’

‘Bloody right. It’s the panama. An Italian fellow your age wouldn’t be seen dead in one. It’s the Fascist fez or a fedora here. And that’s a Wykehamist’s tie, if I’m not mistaken. Esmond, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Goad told us about you. You’re coming to lunch on Sunday after church. I’m Colonel Keppel — George. Pleased to meet you. Off to the galleries?’

‘I think so. I was going to wander—’

‘Don’t wander. Too much to see. The Uffizi closes for lunch at one. You should eat at the Nuova Toscana in the Piazza della Signoria. Say I sent you. Then back to the Uffizi for a couple of hours and then the Bargello. See you Sunday.’

‘Thanks!’ Esmond is chased across the street by a bicycle. He passes in front of stone and stucco palazzos, their faces coloured cream or ochre, saffron, apricot, or white with terracotta crenellation. He strides through a piazza where restaurateurs set out their tables in spots of sun, then down the via Calimala. The Blackshirts he’d seen from his window pass him and he returns their straight-arm salute, conscious of his foreigner’s hat. He resolves to buy a fedora at the first opportunity. He hears the Blackshirts’ laughter echoing down the street behind him.

Esmond turns the corner into the Piazza della Signoria and his breath catches in his throat. Bare brick, parapets, the clock tower, Michelangelo’s David. The palazzo looks like a castle; beside it sculptures cluster on the terrace of the loggia, guarded by stone lions. His eye falls immediately on Perseus holding the Gorgon’s head, tendons and gore streaming from the neck.

A tram clatters past, swaying on its rails, heading down into the narrow streets beside the palace. Electronic speakers mounted on the corners of buildings squawk out military anthems. Esmond makes his way past David, whose comely half-turn and tight pubic hair remind him of Philip, and down towards the river and into the arcade of the Uffizi. And he felt — he remembers D. H. Lawrence — that here he was in one of the world’s living centres, in the Piazza della Signoria. The sense of having arrived — of having reached the perfect centre of the human world. He grins foolishly.

5

He had read of Stendhal’s collapse on leaving the church of Santa Croce, a fit of panic brought on by the presence of too much beauty, too much history. It is not exactly panic he feels now, coming out of the gallery, but an anguished and somnolent wonder. He cannot remember having lunch, whether he took Colonel Keppel’s advice or not. He didn’t make it to the Bargello. He walks past a group of Blackshirts who stand on a street corner, eyeing passers-by, the death’s heads on their shirts polished to a shine, but he barely sees them. They call after him when he fails to return their salute but he carries on, oblivious.

He pauses for a moment in the centre of a piazza and closes his eyes. Filippo Lippi’s Madonna with Child and Two Angels, his son Filippino’s Adoration of the Magi. Then the Botticellis — Primavera and the Birth of Venus, of course, but also Pallas and the Centaur, the Madonna of the Pomegranate. He tries to summon every detail to mind. The purity and humanity of the Madonna. Venus’s toes, he remembers, long and prehensile, the way her head cocks to one side, the tress of golden hair she presses to her groin.

He’d spent an hour in front of Filippino’s St Jerome. It had seemed an antidote to the easy pleasure he drew from Botticelli. This was a painting his father could love: the saint’s skin was grey-green, his eyes hollow. This, Esmond thought, was what came after. When one has lived with Venus and Flora for long enough, there is only the hillside, the penitence, the twisted branches and dank grottoes. He walks on as the sun dips behind buildings and a breeze sweeps up from the river and he imagines a lifetime of this, being breathed by Florence.

Back at the Institute, the courtyard is dark. A square of light from the window of Goad’s study falls onto the flagstones, otherwise all is shadow. He climbs the steps to the apartment and opens the door. He looks for a light switch, can’t find one, and edges carefully along until he comes to his door. He pushes and gasps. A young girl, long tanned back to the door, sits naked at a dressing table, combing her hair. There are books on the floor, drowsy jazz on the gramophone, dresses laid out on the bed. In the instant before he shuts the door, he sees the pale undersides of raised arms, the reflection of smiling, startled eyes.

He hurries along the corridor, realising he has confused the three sides of the apartment. He turns a corner to the kitchen, the smell of roast meat, the spitting of a pan and Gesuina’s low humming. He finds his door in the half-light, walks in and fumbles for a cigarette. Gesuina has made up his bed, the windows are closed and the ashtray empty. He slips off his shoes, pulls off his tie, tries to force his mind back to the Uffizi, but sees only that long back and dark-freckled shoulders, a coral bangle fallen halfway down a bare arm.

He opens the windows to the street. The tramp with the pheasant feather cap is still sitting on the steps of the church, in the edges of a pool of light that falls from the streetlamp. A military truck, its bonnet painted with the fasces, roars down the road. Esmond watches the tramp’s eyes following it. There is a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ he says.

In a plain, yellow cotton dress, no shoes or stockings, she is as astonishing dressed as she was naked. Her black hair is pinned in a high pony-tail. She smiles but her eyes remain cool. ‘I am Fiamma Ricci. The daughter of Gesuina.’ The accent is heavy, her English hesitant but precise. ‘I live here with Mr Goad while I study at Florence University.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Listen, I’m awfully sorry—’ Esmond gets up, lifts a pile of shirts from the chair at his desk and scrapes it towards her. She folds one foot beneath her as she sits.

‘Please, don’t worry. It is easy to be lost here.’

Esmond grinds out his cigarette in the ashtray and offers her the packet. She shakes her head.

‘So how long do you stay with Mr Goad, Esmond?’

‘I’m not sure. As long as it takes. I’m here to set up a radio station. For the British Union.’

She looks up at him with a sly smile. ‘This is Fascist, right? You do not look like a Fascist. A Nazi, maybe, all that blond hair. But not a Fascist.’

He swallows and sits, straight-backed, on the edge of the bed.

‘You are a Fascist like Mr Goad is a Fascist, perhaps?’ she says. ‘He is an intellectual gentleman. Not like the brutes we have here.’

‘Oh, we have our share of brutes,’ he says, thinking of William Joyce, Mosley’s right-hand man, breaking windows in the Jewish East End. ‘And you have noble Fascists, too. What about Ungaretti, d’Annunzio?’

‘You like poetry? I am glad. Then you will be a friend for Mr Goad. He is lonely, I think, since his wife died. Too much work.’

There is silence between them. They hear footsteps pass in the corridor.

‘Listen, mightn’t you show me some of the city? It would be super to have a local guide.’

Her smile fades as she stands.

‘I am not a local. We are from Milan, my mother and I.’

‘Oh. Right then.’

She walks to the door and opens it, turning back to address him from the hallway. ‘My father is in the gaol there. He is a Socialist, a political man. He wrote for L’Ordine Nuovo. He has been in exile, on an island. Now he is back in Milan, like a common prisoner. I haven’t seen him since I was ten.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It is not your fault. If you have to be a Fascist, just make sure you are the right kind, not like that fat frog who calls himself our leader. Now I go out. Good night.’

She closes the door behind her. Esmond lights another cigarette and sits on the windowsill, looking down at the young people gathering outside Casoni and Doney’s. A motorcycle engine revs and the bell of San Gaetano tolls eight. He sees Fiamma come out into the street. She is wearing a dark blue jacket over her dress, a pair of high-heeled sandals, her hair wrapped inside a crocheted yellow snood. As she walks south towards the Arno, he sees her, bright and bobbing in the pale streetlamps, in the light from the doorways of cafés. She turns the corner, glances back up the via Tornabuoni, and is gone.

6

Dinner is cold meat, a bowl of salad, some bread. A single glass sits at Esmond’s place. When he enters the dining room he sees Goad struggling to pull a cork from a bottle of wine.

‘Ah, I thought you might — huh —’ He stifles a shout and frees the cork, sending a short crescent of dark wine into the air. ‘Blast. I thought you might like some wine. This is Arcimboldi Chianti, made by the family from whom we rent the palazzo. Beautiful vineyards at their villa in Val di Pesa.’

‘I’d love some, thanks.’

Goad half-fills the glass and then painstakingly reintroduces the cork.

‘I can’t stomach alcohol, myself. Brings on my black dog.’

He watches as Goad slices and chews carefully, eyes closing. Esmond finishes his wine in a couple of gulps and glances meaningfully at the bottle on the table. When Goad has eaten the last of his ham he pours himself some water and, finally seeing Esmond’s empty glass, passes the wine.

‘Do help yourself, dear boy. We don’t stand on ceremony here. I’m afraid these evening meals will seem rather drab to you. I don’t like to ask Gesuina to work too late, particularly when it’s only the two of us dining.’

Goad peels and cores an apple with his pocket-knife. Esmond sips wine and clears his throat. ‘I met Fiamma earlier.’

‘Ah, did you. And how did you find her?’

‘Very charming. It’s good of you to provide for her.’

‘Hum — Did she tell you her story?’

‘That her father is in prison.’

‘It’s rather more complicated. You see, Gesuina, her mother, is the half-sister of Niccolò Arcimboldi, from whom we rent this palazzo. She married a Milanese.’

‘A journalist, she said.’

‘Although he’s not published a word, at least in any newspaper worth the name, for some time. In and out of gaol, exiled to Ustica and Lipari for sedition. He’s a member of Giustizia e Libertà, the anti-Fascist movement. A thoroughly bad egg. He was arrested for helping Socialists escape from prison. Not a thought for his wife and daughter. After a year in squalor in Milan, Gesuina came home and threw herself on her brother’s mercy.’

‘And he asked you to take them in?’

‘Niccolò Arcimboldi is one of the hardliners. Believes Mussolini isn’t going far enough, that Italy should round up the Jews, purge the factories, shoot the Communists. He’s chums with Carità at the MVSN, marches around looking for Reds to set about. Gesuina marrying a Socialist riled him terribly. So when she and her daughter came back to Florence, Niccolò reluctantly agreed to put them up. Asked me if I could use her as a housemaid. And since the apartment isn’t full, even when Gerald is here, and it reduces our overheads—’

‘Doesn’t she resent it, Gesuina?’

Goad scratches his hands.

‘She is here as a guest, she knows that. Over the past few years we have grown — hum — comfortable. Since my wife died she runs the household. I believe it suits her very well. Fiamma is different. She was horribly impertinent at first. Rather trite, adolescent talk. Now she’s a closed book. Not unruly any more so much as — hum — inaccessible.’

‘It must be hard for her, not knowing how her father is. And she’s studying?’

‘Literature, or so she says. Dante and Boccaccio this year, but you wouldn’t know it to speak to her. She’s out at dances most of the time, home late, connecting with heaven knows whom.’

He looks more closely at Esmond, a slice of apple paused on the approach to thin lips.

‘You might befriend her, Esmond. I feared you wouldn’t encounter enough young people, cooped up here with — hum — the aged adviser. And she would surely benefit from the company of someone as sensible and purposeful as you. Yes, this really is very good.’ He smiles and pops the apple into his mouth.

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Capital.’ Goad rises. ‘I must prepare my lessons. Our students return from their Easter vacation on Monday. You’ll find the place quite different when they’re around. Serious young fellows, most of them, but I do enjoy the peace of the holidays. Good night.’

Esmond waits for a few minutes and then, careful to ensure that no one sees him, makes his way up, the three-quarters full bottle of wine in one hand, glass in the other. He closes his door, fastens the shutters and windows and switches on his desk lamp. Pouring out a glass, he sits at the desk and picks up his pen.

Florence is beautiful, he writes, imagining Philip in a Viennese tearoom, white marble tables and clever laughter. I’m staying at the British Institute. It’s in the heart of the city, a fifteenth-century palace. Lots of dark passageways and tapestries. You imagine turning a corner and finding Michelangelo arguing with Ficino. He takes a sip of his wine and lights a cigarette. I can’t tell you how glorious the Uffizi is. He wonders where Fiamma is now. On the dancefloor of some half-lit nightclub, a pack of wolfish boys around her. I worry about you. I always look out for Vienna in the newspaper. If you get a chance to leave, you should. Tanti auguri (as the locals say!), Esmond.

He folds the letter into an envelope. Pouring another glass of wine and picking up his towel, he makes for the bathroom. Filling the bath so hot that a bank of steam hovers above it, he lowers himself into the water, cups his glass and reclines. He feels Philip’s absence in the groan of his stomach. He remembers a day in May when they’d cycled to Grantchester, the sun on Philip’s tanned shoulders, the sudden shower that sent them into the cover of bushes, the damp grasping for each other as the rain pounded around them and their lips became two wet, living things. He remembers sitting with Philip in F. R. Leavis’s lectures, the older boy with his hand on Esmond’s thigh, and then in the saloon bar of the Pickerel, where they drank with Leavis and talked until closing about Russian novels and the book-buttressed adventure their lives would be.

With Philip, something had loosened within him, his childhood lifting under the beam of the older boy’s careful love. Until then he’d felt himself, before anything else, his father’s son. At Cambridge he was pointed out as Sir Lionel Lowndes’s boy, scion of the second family of the British Union. People were surprised he wasn’t in black. On Philip’s arm, he felt himself different, decent.

He lets the bath run out with a gurgle and goes back to his room. He puts on his nightshirt, reads for an hour and then sleeps. In his dream, Fiamma and Philip are together, dancing with the clever, cautious footsteps of the cat on the pavement outside San Gaetano.

7

At a quarter to nine, Esmond walks through the courtyard of the Institute, past the portrait of the dead King, out onto via Tornabuoni. A light drizzle, little more than mist, pearls on the manes and tails of the horses. Bicyclists pass with umbrellas held high and the window of Doney’s is steamy with breakfast. An old woman steps from a cab into Pretini’s hair salon, tutting. Esmond turns up the collar of his mackintosh and makes his way onto the via degli Strozzi.

By the time he gets to the Piazza della Signoria, the shower has passed and a tentative sun emerges. People come out of shop doorways, furl their umbrellas and wait for their trams. He wafts his letter from Il Duce and is ushered through a silent inner courtyard where gargoyles spew from the capitals of columns, then to a wooden bench in a gilded hall, where the guard asks him to wait.

Small, well-dressed men hurry back and forth, heads down. Occasionally a Blackshirt, skull and crossbones on his chest, marches past. Esmond draws A Room With a View from his pocket and begins to read. After a few minutes, a peroxidial secretary shows him into the mayor’s office. The Podestà sits at a large desk between two windows, one of which is open to the morning. Over his right shoulder, against the brightening sky, stands a stocky figure with his back to the room, looking down to the banks of the Arno. The mayor gestures towards one of the armchairs facing him.

‘Please, Mr Lowndes, have a seat.’ He opens a silver cigarette case and holds it out.

Esmond takes one, tilts forward to accept a flame and sits. The Podestà lights his own cigarette and leans back.

‘My name’, he says, ‘is Count Alfonso Gaetano.’

Esmond smiles shyly. ‘Like the church,’ he says.

The mayor raises an eyebrow. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Oswald when he and his late wife came to visit some years ago. A most remarkable man. Now this project of a wireless broadcast to educate our citizens, to forge ties between the right-thinking men of your country and ours. Bravo! Mussolini himself has given his full support. If I, humbly, may be of any assistance at all, you must tell me.’ He reaches across and presents a creamy card with his full title in loping cursive.

‘Decent of you,’ Esmond says. At this moment, a butterfly, a cabbage white, flutters blithely into the room, borne up on a breeze from the river. It pauses for a moment on the windowpane, opening and closing its wings. The stocky figure at the window shoots out a plump hand and crushes the insect against the glass with his thumb, leaving a green smear. The mayor turns at the sound.

‘I must introduce you to our local communications expert, Mario Carità.’ The man, unhealthy-looking in black shirt and grey flannel shorts, inspects his thumb for a moment and turns to face them. He looks, Esmond thinks, like a pickled schoolboy, save for a streak of white in quiffed hair and his eyes, hard and black and glassy.

‘Carità will fix you up with your studio, with all the equipment you need. He’s one of the coming men in this town. Doing business in Italy, you’ll find, is all about whom you know, and Carità knows everybody.’

The little man steps forward. His palm is damp. ‘I happy to meet you—’ He pauses, holding Esmond’s hand, smiling bloodlessly. ‘You and me, we make radio big success.’

The Podestà looks at his watch. ‘I have a committee meeting. Please do feel free to stay here and get acquainted.’ He gives a bow, collects some papers from the desk and leaves. After a pause, Carità pulls out the mayor’s chair and sits down, reaching for the floor with the balls of his feet.

‘We need make things straight,’ he says. ‘I no like English. We not need English here. For too long English treat Florence like a home. But’ — he gives a reluctant grin — ‘Podestà says you good Fascist. For me, nationality not so important, Fascism important.’ He stands, walks over to Esmond and leans down to embrace him. He smells of wet vegetation.

‘Hey,’ Carità stands back waggling his finger. ‘You tell Goad, he not pay enough for translation and radio work. I not a teacher. I a soldier first’ — he points to the death’s head on the breast of his shirt — ‘second electrician.’

‘Fine,’ says Esmond. ‘When do you think we can start?’

Carità lifts himself to sit on the desk, picks up the Podestà’s fountain pen and begins to play with it, tutting. ‘I’m not so sure. I very busy man. You wait to hear from me, va bene?’ he says finally. Esmond nods. ‘Good boy. We work very well together, I know this. Arrivederci.’

Esmond walks out into the morning. The rain has returned, settling in puddles. He pulls his mackintosh up over his head. At the entrance to Doney’s some girls laugh under an umbrella as a boy steps into the road to flag down a taxi. They tumble in, the boy holding the door and another taking the brolly. Esmond watches as the girls pat their hair and the boys call orders to the driver. The girl nearest turns her face and he sees it is Fiamma. She smiles and presses a hand to the glass, her breath misting it as she laughs. Esmond waves, feeling foolish, as one of the other girls leans over to look at him, tented under his raincoat. Now both girls laugh and the taxi pulls away. He drops his hand and walks back towards the palazzo.

He starts another letter to Philip. Perhaps this is all for the best, he lies. Perhaps I’ll find someone else who’ll make me feel as good, as loved as you did. You invented my heart, you know. A postcard of Primavera to his father. I am doing my best for the Party. Give my love to mother. To Anna, the Gorgon shield by Caravaggio. I miss you. Have decided to restart my novel. How are you? He closes his eyes and thinks of Anna. She has weak lungs, her childhood one long, soft handshake with death. He remembers sitting beside her, pressing her burning skin, reading to her. In turn, she’d loved him, and her love was the thread that led him out of the labyrinth of spite and recrimination that was his family. He kisses the Gorgon’s head as he steps down to the postbox at Cook’s.

He eats dinner alone — Goad is at the German Consulate, Gesuina says — then goes to his room and lies on his bed. He opens a notebook on his knees and writes Chapter One. Music rises from the street, happy voices, the clatter of plates from Doney’s. He throws the notebook to the floor, strips off and crawls under the covers. He thinks of the look of mock absorption he and Philip would shoot discreetly at one another whenever someone nearby was being particularly dull. He pulls the pillow over his head. Later that night, he wakes as a door bangs. He wonders if it is Fiamma coming home. He listens for a moment to the night, to a disappointed silence. He turns over and falls into a deep, blank sleep.

8

On Sunday morning, Esmond pulls on a green jumper and tweed jacket. He and Goad meet at a quarter to ten in front of the late King and walk together through the mist, down the via Tornabuoni to the Ponte Santa Trinità. The bells ring across the city, people hurry to secure the best pew in the best church.

‘The ignominy of the side-aisle,’ Goad cautions, ‘and the Lady Chapel.’

Mist cushions the river, thick and white. When they reach the centre of the bridge, the bells of the town begin to muffle, and Goad peers nervously over the stone bulwarks. Sounds creep up through the mist towards them: the slop of the river, fishermen on the banks downstream, the distant bellow of the weir.

‘It’s as if we were underwater,’ Esmond says.

‘Or lost in time.’

They reach the south side of the river and walk down the via Maggio towards an old palazzo. There is no spire, only a small gold sign: St Mark’s English Church. The front is weather-beaten, the wash on the pietra serena chipped and flaking. Wire birdcages hang at eye height outside the shops and cafés on the street. None of the birds — canaries, zebra finches, parakeets, bullfinches — are singing. They stand in front of the church and Esmond looks down the line of silent cages. Goad makes his way through a wicket gate set in the large oak doors; Esmond ducks to follow.

In the entrance hall a flight of stone steps rises ahead of them, passing through an arch and curling out of sight. Green baize notice boards: Italian Lessons Offered, Vieusseux’s Circulating Library and Christian Lady Lodger Seeks Room in Central Location. The cards have yellowed and curled at the edges. They remind Esmond of the boards on the walls of the common room at Winchester, scholarships to Oxford and rowing blues, messages of triumph from the world to come. A crackling organ begins, and Goad leads them through a small door to the left.

In near-darkness, they make their way down the aisle towards the altar, a block of white marble with lambs and palm trees in alabaster bas-relief. It looks ancient and sacrificial, scrubbed of blood each night, Esmond thinks, as they shuffle into a pew near the front. On the wall behind the altar is a triptych of the crucifixion. Christ’s crown of thorns draws blood at every needle, his ribs press closely against his skin. Blood seeps and clots at the wounds in his hands and feet, where the nails are thick and twisted. The left-hand panel of the triptych shows Mary Magdalene, mourning, just as withered and undone. On the right is John the Baptist clinging to a gold cross. All three have grey-green skin, faces gaunt and horrified, every tendon and muscle risen. Esmond thinks of Filippino’s painting of St Jerome in the Uffizi. The same leached skin, the hopeless terror.

‘Rather brutal, hum?’ says Goad.

‘It’s ghastly. Is it Filippino Lippi?’

‘Ha! Bernard Berenson thinks so. Art expert, lives at I Tatti, up towards Fiesole. The triptych was owned by Charles Tooth, queer fish, by all accounts. He was the first vicar here and the triptych just hung around, so to speak. It was only when Berenson came for a lunchtime recital that we realised it was, that it might be, something rather special.’

‘I must write to my father and tell him. He adores Filippino.’

‘Had quite a collection, didn’t he?’

Esmond thinks of the chapel at Aston Magna, the family home seized by the banks after the Crash. There was no altar, no pews or promises, just his father’s paintings, stained glass replaced by clear panes to better light the cheeks of a Bronzino goldfinch, the pietà by Filippino Lippi, the Gentileschi Judith. His father had felt the loss of the paintings more than the house or the family firm. He’d blamed the unions in the factories, the Jews in the banks and the courts. Above all he blamed the Socialists, who’d pushed him from conservatism into full-blooded Fascism. Communism was a red rash on the mind of the family.

St Mark’s is like the chapel at Aston: secular, cluttered, flannelled with dust. A great-aunt’s attic. A grand piano sits at the back with a sheet over it. A sofa supports three peeling pictures of the Madonna. Chairs stacked down the side-aisles. A smell of damp and plaster, the sense of benign but terminal neglect. The darkness is partly due to the narrow clerestory windows at either end, and partly because everything is painted a light-eating crimson: the walls, the pillars, even some of the pews.

Goad bows his head to pray and Esmond looks around. He hadn’t realised how many worshippers had crowded into the darkness — all of them old, obviously British in their twill and tweed, floral hats and medals. Colonel Keppel is bolt upright in the front row beside a martial woman with a large nose. Behind them, on his own, is an old man in a double-breasted suit, a single comb of hair across his head. Goad looks up and the old man waggles thick eyebrows.

‘Reggie,’ whispers Goad.

‘Wotcha,’ the man says.

Another old man steps jauntily down the aisle. He wears a high-buttoned jacket, Edwardian-style, with turn-ups to the cuffs, a grey shirt and vermilion handkerchief. He stoops and crosses himself in the aisle, then edges into the pew behind Esmond and Goad. He leans his face between them.

‘Goad.’ His voice is a whispered quiver. Esmond can feel his breath — peppermint — on his cheek. ‘And I don’t believe we’ve met—’

‘Esmond Lowndes,’ Goad says. ‘Reggie Temple. One of our two Reggies. The other is Turner.’

‘How confusing,’ Esmond says.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ says the nearer Reggie. ‘Other Reggie looks like a Turner. All washed out. And I’ve still got hair at the temples.’ He gives a dry giggle. ‘Going to the Keppels’ later? Lunch?’ The organ grows louder and his head retreats. The congregation stands and heavy footsteps sound in the aisle.

‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

The priest is tall, in a black cassock with a white lace smock on his shoulders. He is handsome — narrow black moustache, sharp blue eyes, a heaviness around the jowls, the creeping solidness of age. His voice is deep with a faint Scottish burr.

‘Welcome, all of you. Jolly good to see so many here. Those that have gone, go with our blessing, of course, but while there’s a single one of you left in Florence, I’ll be here every morning, twice on Sundays.’ He gives a sad smile. ‘I’m afraid Walter Goodwin was among the latest exodus, so I shall need a new sacristan. A Reggie, perhaps?’

Turner looks at Temple. ‘You wouldn’t be able to reach,’ he whispers sharply, rising to walk down the aisle.

‘Thank you, Reggie. Now, we’ve had an approach from Holy Trinity to combine services. Father Hywell-Jones wishes to take his family back to Wales. Given that their congregation has held up rather worse than ours, we shall welcome all eight or nine of them next week. Remember that they are more sombre in their worship than we are, and be kind.

‘In better news, and against the general trend, we have a guest with us. I’d like to welcome Esmond Lowndes, who is staying with Harold Goad at the British Institute. He’s over here to set up, of all things, a radio station, with the aim of building bridges between the British and Italians. All I can say is jolly good luck to you, Esmond, God bless, and if there’s anything any of us here at St Mark’s can do to help, then do let us know.’ Everyone turns to look at Esmond and he raises a shy hand towards the priest and nods. ‘Now let us pray—’

There is no service sheet and Esmond has trouble remembering the words. At school he’d spent his time in chapel looking at the backs of the younger boys, soft blond napes that shimmered in the stained light. Sometimes he’d humour baroque sexual fantasies of the barmaid at The Wykeham Arms, so that he’d have to struggle his erection into place before walking up to receive his blessing. Here, though, he can’t drag his eyes from the triptych. He feels the pressure of Mary Magdalene’s desert gaze, the heft of the russet hair that tumbles down over her back like a pelt. She holds her arms across her chest as if, were she to let go, she’d burst forth, ruptured by the weight of her sorrow. John’s eyes, deep in sallow cheeks, peer up to his crucified God in appalled disbelief. Their bodies are chicken-thin and painful to look at. When he goes up to the altar rail beside Goad and bows his head, he shudders at his nearness to the painting.

After the service, Goad prays for a long time. Colonel Keppel and his wife stride down the aisle, nodding sternly at Esmond as they pass. Other expatriates step away, pausing only to genuflect broadly. The women are artistic and nervous, hanging onto the last vestiges of girlhood, or rather finding them again, turning up in their late-life bodies something gamine, playful, fragile. Their husbands march stiffly behind them, hands behind their backs. Finally Goad shakes his head and stands. The priest, who has taken off his smock and cassock and stands in a grey suit, is extinguishing candles at the back of the church with a brass snuffer. When he sees Esmond and Goad coming towards him, he puts it down and rubs his hands together, smiling.

‘Now then, Esmond.’ His palm is smooth and cool. ‘Harold, good morning.’

‘I thought we might show Esmond the room, if you have a moment,’ Goad says.

‘Of course. Perhaps I could drive you up to Bellosguardo afterwards.’

They make their way back through the entrance and follow Father Bailey up the dark stairwell. The priest takes the steps two at a time and Goad is soon panting, reaching for the support of Esmond’s elbow. Bailey stops to wait for them.

‘Here we are.’ Bailey turns through a bunch of keys, selects one and opens the door onto a corridor, dimly lit by a window at the far end.

‘It was the Machiavelli family palazzo,’ Bailey says. ‘He was born in one of these rooms. Amazing, isn’t it?’ He throws open doors as he passes, showing empty rooms thick with dust. They come to the end of the corridor. ‘Now tell me what you think of this.’ He opens the last door on the left and they step into a large, white space. It reminds Esmond for a moment of the ballroom at Aston Magna. Four French windows open onto a narrow balcony overlooking the church of Santo Spirito. He can see young men playing football in the piazza, doves in a gossipy cluster on the tiled roof.

‘I spoke to Father Bailey,’ Goad puffs, ‘about a studio. He suggested you might use this. For a small contribution to the upkeep of the church, of course, but—’

‘You’d be welcome to have it for nothing, Esmond. Far too quiet around here recently and what you’re doing is more good than harm. If Harold’s behind you, that’s endorsement enough for me.’

Esmond can see fingers of damp creeping up the walls, patches of mould that fur the far corner. Parquet tiles are chipped, missing in places. Dust covers the stone mantelpiece at the far end. He breathes the smell and lets out his breath in a low whistle.

‘This is smashing.’

‘Glad you approve. Now, oughtn’t we get going? I’m ruddy terrified of Alice Keppel.’

With a last look at the room, Esmond follows Goad and Bailey back along the corridor, down the steps and through a side door into the garage and Bailey’s old, rather dazzling, red Alfa Romeo. They drive out into the misty square, along streets so narrow that rugs touch as the women shake them from high windows. Finally, with a careless roar from the car, they wind up into the hills and out of the city.

9

The Villa dell’Ombrellino takes three terraced steps down the hillside. The uppermost has a gravel path between lemon trees, plumbago and gardenia. There is a vegetable garden further down growing beefsteak tomatoes. Fountains babble in the shade of umbrella pines. The house is large and symmetrical with a loggia running the length of the ground floor. Most of the lunch guests are sitting here smoking and sipping sherry.

Esmond is at the front of the upper terrace with Colonel Keppel. His hand rests on the metal pole that supports the brass parasol, the ombrellino, and they look down across the mist to the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, and beyond it the plump dome of the cathedral. Otherwise Florence is obscured.

Colonel Keppel is smoking a pipe, nestling the stem under his moustache and drawing deeply. He steps forward to the stone wall that marks the edge of the uppermost terrace.

‘Have you seen the pool?’ he asks, pointing downwards with his pipe.

Esmond joins him at the balcony and looks over. A camphor tree grows at the top of a rocky grotto where a shadowy swimming pool crags under ferns and hostas. Over the shallow end are bronze statues, two dodos, covered in verdigris. He thinks of Philip floating star-shaped in the pool at Emmanuel College, misquoting Byron, paddling with his hands.

‘Modelled on the Roman baths at Caracalla. Same chap who did the garden, Cecil Pinsel.’

‘It’s beautiful. Why the dodos?’

‘Reminder that we’re all dying and all stupid. It’s why I built the pool. Attracts the young, or used to, until they buggered off back to London. Important, when you get to my age, to surround yourself with young people. You must come and swim here when the weather improves. It’d make Alice happy.’ He pauses. ‘D’you enjoy the service?’

‘Yes. It’s a funny little church.’

‘Funny priest, too. Goad tell you about Bailey?’

‘No.’

Colonel Keppel glances over his shoulder.

‘Confidentially, he’s a spy. Intelligence Corps during the last war and now reporting back to Whitehall on Musso.’

‘He’s not a priest?’

‘Oh, he’s an amen-wallah all right — it’s his cover. He got me to carry a few packages to London when we went to heave Violet, that’s our daughter, down the aisle. Very hush-hush.’ He touches his nose. ‘Disappears for days in that sports car of his. Up to the mountains. Giustizia e Libertà, I shouldn’t wonder. Now, not a word of this. Scout’s honour?’

‘Scout’s honour.’

Alice Keppel comes down the path from the house. Goad, on her arm, looks shrunken, doll-like. The four of them face over towards the hills of the Sienese Clavey that billow up out of the mist.

‘I hope I didn’t embarrass you at lunch, young man,’ she says, without turning. ‘Out here, one assumes that everyone knows everything.’

‘It’ll take more than your youthful indiscretions to make Esmond blush.’ Colonel Keppel pats her buttock. ‘Hasn’t heard about me and dear old Victoria yet. Not for nothing were they called the naughty nineties.’

Over lunch, leaning closely, Mrs Keppel had told Esmond how dreadfully sorry she was for Wallis. The problem was, she said, Mrs Simpson didn’t know what she wanted. When she, Mrs Keppel, had been the mistress of Edward’s grandfather, she’d been very clear. She wanted money. Money so that she might live in the style that her ancestors had enjoyed. Money so that she might take her husband away to a place like this — she’d waved her hand across the dinner table, the plates of food and silver candlesticks. And when the King had come to stay, George had gone shooting, or riding, and the King had ridden her. Here she laughed breathily.

Now, on the terrace, she wraps a heavy arm around his shoulder.

‘It’s divine to have you here, Esmond. I’m always saying to Harold that he must get Fiamma and Gerald, when he’s over, to come up and swim, but I’m afraid he disapproves of us.’

Goad clucks. ‘Not at all, Alice. It’s just that — hum — young people—’

‘But the young are what George and I live for. I insist that Esmond come up to bathe soon.’

Goad looks doubtfully at the water below.

‘I’d love to,’ Esmond says, aware of the weight of her arm.

A gust of wind rattles the pines around the house. Mrs Keppel finally lifts her arm and begins to shiver. Father Bailey crunches down from the house with a shawl, which he wraps around her shoulders.

‘We should leave you,’ Goad says.

‘Oh, do stay a little longer.’

The mist begins to clear beneath them. Gradually, in little plots and then in larger pools of light, Florence reveals the dome of San Lorenzo, Santa Croce to the east, the Badia Fiorentina, Santo Spirito. As the sun strolls from rooftop to rooftop, rusticated brickwork and cool white facades appear, the huge teal egg of the synagogue, and villas like a loose necklace across the hills.

‘It must be difficult, at moments like this,’ Goad says, ‘not to believe in God.’

‘Amen,’ says Bailey.

Esmond feels weightless, as if he could sail down over the currents of air.

‘Harold. You and your sublime,’ Colonel Keppel says, turning and leading them back to the house. Esmond takes a last look at the pool, the city beyond, and follows.

In Bailey’s car on the way home, the priest leans over his shoulder and speaks to Esmond, who is perched in the cramped rear.

‘Did you realise that your host was a holy man too?’ he says.

‘Colonel Keppel?’

‘Your real host, Harold here.’

Goad looks out at the landscape. ‘Oh, come now.’

‘I’m entirely serious. If he hadn’t been so taken with politics, he’d have made a sparkling priest. Is that not so, Harold?’

Goad shakes his head. Esmond sees a half-smile on his lips. ‘I wanted to find a way of — hum — doing some good.’

‘He’d cut his tongue out before telling you this, but he used his inheritance to found an orphanage at Assisi. Eighteen years old. A year in a Franciscan monastery in the Apennines after that. He’s done more good than most saints I know.’

‘You’re too kind, Father Bailey.’

‘I just want young Esmond to know what sort of man he’s living with.’

‘I do,’ Esmond says. ‘Really.’

10

The next day, just before lunch, Esmond is in the library with Goad. The older man sits in a high-backed armchair reading Browning. Every so often he rolls out a warm chuckle, or mutters ‘Yes, yes,’ to himself. Esmond watches dust riding the beams of light from the windows. They hear the front door clang and footsteps on the stairs. Goad looks at his watch and stands, Esmond with him.

‘Here she is,’ says Goad, as a woman, mid-twenties, Esmond guesses, with a hard, grown-up air, walks in. Her knotted hair is deep red, the colour of Mary Magdalene’s in the triptych. Goad crosses to kiss her. As he reaches up to take her by the shoulders, on tiptoe, and place a kiss on each pale cheek, she stoops a little to meet him, and Esmond sees how thin she is, barely filling her tunic and slacks.

‘Harold,’ she says. ‘I’m late.’

‘Not at all. Ada Liuzzi, Esmond Lowndes. Ada’s father, Guido, edits the Florentine edition of La Nostra Bandiera.’

Esmond takes her hand and notices a mole, a dark moon in the orbit of her left eye.

‘Pleasure to meet you,’ he says.

Gesuina places a tray on the table beside Goad’s armchair. Goad picks up the teapot and fills three china cups.

‘From England,’ he says. ‘One simply can’t get good tea out here. Milk?’

Ada looks from one of them to the other. She raises the tea carefully to her lips and sips. There is something almost manly about her face, Esmond thinks. She is not beautiful. Striking perhaps, even startling, but never beautiful.

‘I told Ada about Radio Firenze. I knew, you see, that she was at a loose end, and I thought she might be a good person to have aboard.’

‘I studied English in Bologna,’ Ada says quietly. ‘I have been looking for a job here in Florence, but with the sanctions and the war in Spain — I thought, perhaps, of America. But for the moment, I would be very happy to help you.’

‘That’s excellent, Ada. I’m sure you’ll find it terribly easy. Some research, some translation with Carità, the wireless man—’

‘I know Carità,’ she says, and Esmond feels a momentary curdling of the atmosphere.

‘Splendid.’ Goad rubs his hands. ‘And I wonder if you might come along for a drink here on Thursday night, for the Coronation. We’ll take the opportunity to halloo those Brits who have — hum — persevered. A bottle of Asti spumante or two, a picture of the new King in the hallway. You’d be very welcome.’

‘I should be delighted,’ Ada says, her face softening. Esmond finds himself grinning back as he and Goad walk her to the door. She kisses him; lavender in her hair and on her pale skin. The two men stand at the top of the stairs, watch her descend and turn out of sight.

Back in the library, Esmond smells the lavender, thinks of her cat’s eyes, her heavy jaw.

‘She’ll be super,’ he says. ‘Her English is excellent.’

‘Yes. She’s a terribly nice girl. Fascinating family. Her father’s a Jew, would you believe? He and Ettore Ovazza, the banker, founded La Nostra Bandiera in Turin. Hugely pro-Fascist, all of them.’

‘But Jews?’

‘Indeed. It’s folly to think the Jews are all Communists and agitators. One which leads some of the British Union chaps in entirely the wrong direction. Il Duce understands that, whatever the racial origins, whatever the dress, the gods, human beings are all about connection, and if you throw people together for long enough, they’ll rub along. Mussolini refuses to implement racial laws because Jews have been here since the days of Ancient Rome. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s doctor was a Jew.’

‘Didn’t Mussolini have a Jewish mistress?’

‘Margherita Sarfatti. Jews here are firstly Italians. What they choose to do in their temples is no concern of ours.’ He looks worried. ‘I hope that isn’t a problem for you? Ada being Jewish. I presumed, like your father, you had no truck with this racialist nonsense.’

‘None at all,’ Esmond replies. ‘I’m just surprised. With everything that’s going on in Germany, and the Italians cosying up to Hitler, the Rome — Berlin Axis and all that.’

‘I can’t help but think’, Goad says, ‘that there’s a degree of exaggeration in what we hear of Germany. The Germans I know are the most civilised people on earth. Simply couldn’t imagine them putting up with that kind of — hum — savagery. I should like, perhaps, to go and see for myself. But now, I must prepare for my lessons.’

Later that evening, from the window of his room, Esmond watches a stream of earnest, dark-suited young men enter the palazzo. He sits down to write Anna a postcard of St Jerome, recalling the two of them sitting in their father’s chapel at Aston Magna, staring up at the paintings, swooning themselves into the future. In art, in books, they’d built a bubble around themselves, impervious to their family, to Fascism. Her illness gave them an excuse for this, for long hours in her room with Middlemarch or The Eustace Diamonds or Tristram Shandy. Whenever I read, he writes, part of me is always reading to you, out loud. He finishes the letter and then sits with his legs on the windowsill, The Decameron in his lap. Bats begin to flutter past like thoughts, sweeping and circling over the streetlights. Just after nine-thirty, he hears voices below and watches as the young men come out, laughing, carrying books, shouting as they scatter into the lamp-lit streets of the city.

Before going to bed, feeling indulgent, nostalgic, he opens his cupboard. Already, his British Union uniform has taken on a historical air, and he’s surprised at the familiar scratch of the twill as he runs a thumb over the collar of the shirt. A sudden keen memory of coming back to Cambridge, important in his uniform after a march in the East End. He’d found Philip in his room and the older boy, silent and ritualistic, had unbuttoned Esmond’s tunic, opened his belt, slipped off the jackboots. He knew that in the silence was a question, and in the hot press of their bare bodies in the frantic hours that followed, a response. Now, concussed by memory, he sleeps.

11

On Thursday night, the entrance hall of the Institute is lit by two standard lamps from the library. The front door is open to the evening. Gesuina, in a sober black smock, is next to a table with the wine. Esmond stands smoking, watching Fiamma balancing her tray of fizzing glasses carefully, proudly, like a completed jigsaw. He is already a little drunk. Goad places a hand in the small of his back and moves him towards a white-bearded man in a smoking jacket.

‘Esmond, let me introduce you to our most celebrated resident, an honorary Brit, Bernard Berenson. Esmond was rather taken by the triptych in the English church. That’s a Filippino, he said, without a blink.’

‘It’s a sin they didn’t sell the thing,’ Berenson says, a faint American twang in his voice. ‘I had the Italian government baying for it, three pages of authentication, and this new priest good as tore it up. Maddening.’ He shakes his head. He reminds Esmond of the photograph of Freud that Philip had pinned to the wall of his study.

‘They are astonishing paintings.’

‘Yes? One refers to a triptych in the singular. But it is special, there’s no doubt.’

‘The colour of the skin. It’s almost alien.’

‘It wouldn’t have been like that at the time, of course. It’s verdaccio, the green undercoat coming through. But it is striking, isn’t it? Filippino was always in the shadow of his mentor, Botticelli, but with the triptych, and his St Jerome in the Uffizi—’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘They’re a whole new mode, as if he were trying to unpaint all the flippant beauty of his earlier work. He’s not studied widely enough, I’m afraid.’

There is a stir at the door, a few shouts of welcome. Esmond sees Gesuina turn and whisper something in her daughter’s ear.

‘Here’s trouble,’ says Berenson. ‘Don’t block the path to the wine. Like getting between a hippo and her young.’ He stands back to let a red-faced man tap through on a silver-topped cane. Behind him comes a smaller fellow, fortyish and chubby, with round spectacles and cheeks.

‘La Signora e la Signorina Ricci, che belle regazze,’ the first man says, bowing to Gesuina and Fiamma behind the table. ‘Come mi fa contento di vedervi.’ He takes two glasses, passes one to his friend and tastes his own. ‘Asti spumante,’ he says, letting out a sigh, ‘il champagne italiano, il nettare degli dei. And who might you be, my angel?’ Sea-grey eyes fix upon Esmond, widening with slow delight. He holds out his hand.

‘Esmond Lowndes. Pleased to meet you.’

‘Norman Douglas,’ the man says with another bow. ‘This is my dear friend Pino Orioli. Is there any particular book of mine you’d like?’

Esmond feels himself blushing. ‘I believe I’ve read most of them, sir.’

‘Oh really? And which is your favourite?’

‘South Wind,’ Esmond says, then, seeing Douglas’s face fall, ‘but, of course, Alone was magnificent, and Old Calabria. Some of the best travel writing I’ve read.’

‘Some of it, eh?’ Douglas frowns at him. ‘I’m not a travel writer. I’m a writer who happens to rush about. Have you read Together?’

‘Yes. I had a great friend at Cambridge from Austria. He said … that you described the country in a way that made it feel more real than his clearest memories.’

‘And you?’ Douglas asks, jabbing a finger towards him. ‘What about you?’

Esmond hesitates. Then, in a small voice, ‘It made me feel like I knew my friend much better than before. That I could understand where he’d come from.’

Douglas twitches his nose. ‘I think we shall be seeing young Mr Lowndes again, don’t you, Pino?’

Orioli grins, waggling his eyebrows and reaching for another glass of wine. Douglas places a hand on Esmond’s shoulder and squeezes. ‘He’s all right, this one.’ With a nod, he drops his hand and speaks again in Italian.

Esmond looks around and realises that Ada isn’t there. He wonders what it will be like to work with her, what closeness might grow between them. He glances sideways at Fiamma. It is a shame, he thinks, that Ada looks so un-Italian, has none of Fiamma’s fine grace. It’s not her Jewishness, rather the squareness of her jaw, the gas-blue skin that make him shiver when he pictures her.

The ting-ting of a fork on glass. Goad stands on the first step of the staircase, pulling at his hands. Esmond sees Berenson and a Reggie, George and Alice Keppel turn and straighten, Father Bailey towering over another Reggie in the corner. Others he doesn’t recognise. He counts eighteen people in the entrance hall.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Goad says. ‘The coronation of George V took place in my first year as Director of the Institute. A gala dinner for eighty guests in the Palazzo Vecchio, bunting stretched across the via Tornabuoni, dancing and fireworks late into the night. Public occasions like this one are a rock in the fluid currents of history, that we may look back and see how far we’ve come. So few of us left in this most English of Italian cities. So many gone.’ He takes a sip of water. ‘For all its roughness, its — hum — youth, we have seen a brave new power driving the history of this country, and it won’t be long before England is the odd man out of Europe. Democracy is dying. Kemal, Horthy, Pisudki in Poland, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain. Herr Hitler.

‘These rumours of war between Britain and Italy — put them from your minds.’ A hear, hear, from Alice Keppel. ‘When the statesmen of Europe fix the mess bequeathed them by the Treaty of Versailles, everything will go on as before. The British and Italians could never be any serious enemies. We are in the middle of a — hum — tiff, nothing more.’

He holds up a framed photograph of the new King, crosses the room, lifts down the picture of George V and smiles at the applause. He stretches up to hook George VI in its place. Esmond looks to see if Ada has arrived, but sees blackness on the street.

‘Most of you have met Esmond Lowndes,’ Goad continues, back at the step. ‘His wireless programme will be broadcast throughout Tuscany. Do go over and say hello. Esmond, stick up a hand. Yes. And if any of you have an idea for a transmission, something we might send out for the instruction of our listeners, don’t — hum — keep it a secret.’

Through the crowd Esmond can see bodies in the street, black-shirted figures outside the doorway.

‘It only remains for me to ask you to charge your glasses and raise them to our new King.’

Alice Keppel lets out a high scream. Two men are inside, stockings pulled over their faces. Douglas and Orioli squeeze past Esmond and head down the corridor to the inner courtyard. Esmond feels Fiamma tense beside him. More black figures enter, six in all, faces smudged like ghosts. One shoves at Reggie Temple, who lands in a heap, breathing heavily. Father Bailey steps forward and the Blackshirt nearest him pulls out a revolver.

The room takes a breath. Two men rush to the table and tip it over. The musical shattering of glasses. A bottle fizzes to Gesuina’s feet and Esmond reaches down to right it. Fiamma, a slash of wine across her blouse, looks towards Esmond. He feels breathless, a shameful excitement in his chest, and meets her dark eyes.

One Blackshirt stands in the door, another in the passageway. The smallest, whom Esmond recognises with swift certainty as Carità, crosses to the photograph of the King, pulls a dagger from his belt. Alice Keppel lets out a whimper. Taking the picture with one hand, he breaks the glass with the hilt of the dagger. He draws the blade carefully across the photograph, opening up long white scars in the King’s uneasy face, and lets it fall. Goad has stepped from the platform towards the Blackshirt.

‘Look here,’ he says. ‘Sapete qui sono io?’

One pulls out a package in brown paper. He hands it to the small man, who slips the blade under the paper and holds up another photograph. In a plain wooden frame, it is a portrait of Victor Emmanuel III, with his absurdly curling moustache and slow-witted eyes.

‘You in Italy,’ the small man says, his voice muffled by the stocking. ‘You have Italian King now.’ He places Victor Emmanuel on the hook and squares it on the wall. ‘Always here. We will come back to check.’

Goad steps towards him, smiling hesitantly.

‘I quite understand, although I’m not sure that we needed the point made quite so dramatically. What would you say to having portraits of both kings together, or perhaps—’

The small man raises his dagger. Esmond feels a lurch. He leaps forward over the upended table, his feet crunching on the glass. The man brings the dagger down hard, landing two sharp blows on Goad’s head, hilt-first. Goad doesn’t pass out, but lowers himself carefully to the ground, a plume of blood darkening his hair. The small man brings his dagger up again as Esmond reaches him, seizing his arm from behind. The man wheels around. His hand is hot and damp.

‘Carità,’ Esmond says.

A pause, and the man takes the opportunity to drive a knee into Esmond’s groin. A sour pain spreads through his body to his throat. He lets go of Carità’s arm and bends double, tears springing to his eyes. He thinks he might vomit. A soft hand on his back and he turns to see Fiamma standing beside him.

‘Basta così!’ she shouts, jutting her chin towards the little man. He regards her for a moment and then lets the dagger fall to his side.

‘Allora, andiamo,’ Carità says. Then, bending over Goad. ‘You think your friends protect you? You tell anyone in Rome and we start to kill English people. Your time has run out. Me ne frego!’ The last is shouted and repeated by the others as they file out. They listen to the Blackshirts singing as they make their way down the via Tornabuoni.

Fiamma is still next to him, her hand on his back. Gesuina is crouched over Goad, speaking softly. Someone has balled a jacket beneath the older man’s head. His cheeks are grey, his eyes closed. Gesuina holds a cloth to the wound. Bailey goes to stand above him.

‘We need an ambulance. Can someone call the Golden Cross?’

‘I’ll go,’ says Fiamma, ‘the telephone is in the library.’

Esmond stands, wincing. He sees Douglas and Orioli appear from the corridor.

‘Everything all right?’ Douglas asks, and looks at Goad.

The Reggies take Douglas and Orioli outside. Father Bailey and Colonel Keppel turn to Esmond.‘How d’you feel?’ the priest asks.

‘I should have thumped them, I really should,’ says Keppel, jabbing in the air.

‘Esmond did more than enough. You’d have ended up like Goad.’

‘I’d like to have seen them try.’ The Colonel pinches his moustache and lets out a gravelled whinny.

‘I’m fine,’ says Esmond. ‘How’s Harold?’

‘He’ll live, lucky fellow. Here they are.’

Two men in blue uniforms come through the door, golden crosses embroidered on their backs. They lift Goad’s arms to their shoulders and carry him to the door.

‘I’ll go along,’ says Bailey. ‘Perhaps, Esmond, you could wire Gerald in the morning. Tell him his father’s had a spot of trouble. He’ll want to know. Gesuina will give you his details.’

12

He and Fiamma are in the kitchen drinking tea. She has changed into green silk pyjamas and looks, Esmond thinks, like a princess from the Arabian Nights. They’d cleared up the entrance hall together, sweeping glass and mopping the sticky floor. It had grown dark and they worked in the light between standard lamps, under the dull gaze of Victor Emmanuel. Now San Gaetano chimes ten o’clock. The pain in his groin has finally lifted. Fiamma fishes a slice of lemon out of her tea with a spoon, sucks it, drops it back into her cup.

‘Where have they taken him, do you think?’

‘Santa Maria Nuova. It’s not far.’ She blows on her tea. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Rum,’ says Esmond. ‘Worried about Harold.’

‘Me too. He looked so unwell on the floor. Bastardi.’ She places her cup in the sink with a crash. ‘You were a good man tonight,’ she says, stepping towards him and walking her fingers across his head. ‘You were brave. Now I must go to bed.’ Esmond’s scalp tingles as he finishes his tea and makes his way along the corridor to his room.

*

The next morning he breakfasts alone and then wires Gerald from Cook’s. He pictures Gerald as a younger version of his father: thinning, hesitant, hands a patchwork of scabs and raw skin. Afterwards he climbs the stairs and knocks on the door to Fiamma’s room.

‘Sì, entra!’ she says. A gramophone plays ‘Summertime’. The Decameron is face down on the dressing table, dresses and jackets on the bed and the doors of her wardrobe. ‘It’s such a mess,’ she says, smiling, picking up her handbag and placing a navy shawl around her shoulders. ‘Let’s go.’

Goad is in a ward with elderly people, all of whom appear to be more or less dead. There is an occasional groan from one of the beds, otherwise silence. Goad’s head is heavily bandaged, his face grey and drawn under the white turban. Bailey sits in a chair beside him, Gesuina in another.

‘How is he?’ Esmond asks. Fiamma takes Goad’s hand, running her thumbs over the skin. Goad opens his eyes narrowly and attempts a smile.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he says.

‘He’ll be fine if he gets some rest,’ says Bailey, firmly. ‘The head seems to be in reasonable condition, nothing broken. But the blood pressure’s terribly high, his heart is not in good shape at all. The doctors have insisted on at least a month of rest.’

‘The shock?’

‘They don’t know, I’m afraid. One suggested—’

‘I’ve told you, Frederick, I simply can’t take the time off. My students rely upon me. And Radio Firenze—’

‘You don’t have the option.’ The priest’s voice is tired and Esmond realises he has been here all night. Gesuina has a basket of food by her feet, a steaming flask of coffee in her hands. Her eyes are red.

‘What about the people who did this, what about Carità?’ Esmond asks.

Goad sighs and shakes his head. ‘Anything we do will just drive a deeper wedge between us. It’s my fault. I should have known, brandishing the picture of the King through the open door. Idiotic. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.’

‘But Mussolini should know about this. We should write to him.’

‘We need to work with Carità, not against him. This is something you must understand, Esmond. We live according to different rules here. Violence is the blood of this new Fascism. I don’t hold it against Carità for a moment, what he did. We were in the wrong and were punished. It’s him I ought to write to — a note of apology.’

A nurse comes in, gently removes Goad’s hand from Fiamma’s and takes his pulse.

‘Signor Goad dovrette dormire,’ she says.

Fiamma kisses Goad on the cheek and squeezes his hand again.

‘Will you let my students know when they arrive this evening? Tell them in person. I don’t think a sign—’

‘Of course,’ Esmond says. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

‘As for the station, it’s down to you now. Prepare, Esmond. Go and see Carità. Square things up with him. Make sure the studio’s ready for when I’m back on my feet.’

Bailey walks with them to the corridor. ‘He’s really very sick,’ the priest says. ‘They were talking about operating, but he’s not well enough for that. He’ll be here for at least another week. I’d like him to take the waters at Bagni di Lucca. I think I’ll be able to persuade Gesuina to go with him, but he’s in no state to travel yet. You’ll hold the fort at the palazzo, you two?’

‘Of course,’ Esmond nods.

‘We’ll manage,’ Fiamma says.

*

At the Institute, Esmond stands at the door and meets the clerks and university students, shop workers and salesmen arriving for Goad’s English lesson. ‘I’m afraid the lessons will have to be postponed. Signor Goad has had an accident. He’s in hospital. I’m terribly sorry.’ He repeats it to each of them. They ask after Goad, if they might visit him, offer their condolences, pressing Esmond’s hands with theirs. When the last has left, Esmond walks into the courtyard, looks up and feels the old building breathing around him. He sees a light flickering against the pale roof of the loggia. He climbs the stairs to the top floor and, instead of turning left towards the bedrooms and the kitchen, he turns right.

He tries the door at the end of the passage. It opens with a creak. There on the loggia, again in green pyjamas, this time with a woollen shawl around her shoulders, sits Fiamma, reading by candlelight, making notes in a pad on her knee. She has found a rusty garden chair to sit on. Esmond steps out onto the pathway between railings and she looks up at him.

‘It’s better to read outside,’ she says. ‘You can hear the city, see the sky, the mountains.’

‘The Decameron?’ he asks.

She holds up the cover and then goes back to her reading.

He looks around. The hills that circle Florence are purpled by the night. Thin feathers of noctilucent cloud sit in the air to the west. To the east, the hills are dark, marked here and there by the lights of villages, the solitary glow of villas.

‘Could I join you?’ he asks.

‘Of course. Do you have any food? My mother’s still at the hospital.’

He crosses to the apartment, finds a loaf of bread and some salami in the pantry, a bottle of red wine and two glasses from the kitchen cupboard. He pulls on a jumper, puts his own copy of The Decameron under his arm and heads back out onto the loggia. Fiamma has unfolded another green chair. They sit, each reading the same book in different languages, each sipping, munching, smiling, sighing as they follow the stories of ten young people, six hundred years earlier, in the very hills which tend them now. When San Gaetano has tolled twelve and the wine is finished, the candle almost down to its holder, Fiamma draws in a sharp breath, shivers and reaches out for Esmond’s hand.

‘My uncle was one of them,’ Fiamma says.

‘One of what?’

‘The men, last night. He passed Carità the portrait of Vittorio Emanuele.’

He can feel her pulse in her palm. Her hands are cold and he seizes them both between his. She looks at him with wide, frank eyes.

‘I can’t believe he could do this to Mr Goad. They have lunch, they are friends even. Something has happened to the people in this city. They are turning against themselves.’ She takes her hands from his and stands up. ‘I must go to bed. I have classes tomorrow.’ He can barely see her eyes in the candlelight. ‘It is good to have you here.’

She bends over and places a kiss on his cheek. He watches her cross the loggia to the door and out of sight. He stays for a while on the rooftop, turning with the drifting stars. Later, in bed, he imagines he can feel the moist press of her lips with his fingertip.

13

They live the next week like a holiday. They get up later, dine longer, fall asleep or into books in the afternoons. Gesuina is in and out of the apartment, leaving meals under muslin cloths on the sideboard in the kitchen, salads in deep glazed bowls in the icebox, loaves of bread on the table. She seems unwilling to quit Goad’s side, particularly at night, when she says he grinds his teeth and calls out, his heart a skipping trot in his chest. She’s usually there at breakfast, looking rinsed but satisfied, her hair in a fretful bun. After Fiamma has left for lectures at the university, Gesuina puts together a basket of food and she and Esmond walk up to Santa Maria Nuova to visit Goad.

Bailey is often at the hospital, his cool assurance a comfort in the wheezing closeness of the ward. His Italian indulges no accent and is garnished with English words and suspect Italianate endings: stethoscopio, for instance. He and Gesuina together, though, are a formidable pairing, and the doctors and nurses soon scurry at their command. Goad is moved into a private room overlooking a flagstoned courtyard, the bluff back of the church and the railway station visible through a gap between hospital buildings.

‘They call it a scorcio,’ Goad says. ‘A view you glimpse, all of a sudden, that leaps inside you. Florence is the city of scorci.’ Pale blue curtains belly in the breeze as they stare out into the bright day. Esmond has brought Goad’s Tennyson, his Foscolo, his Browning, but feels useless now, gently gripping the old man’s hand. He has done nothing about the wireless station, about Carità, and the thought presses upon him. There has also been no word from Gerald.

In the evenings, he and Fiamma have dinner on the loggia. They drink and read, closeness creeping between them as the night inks the hills, bells tolling in the darkness around them. They bring cushions and rugs onto the loggia like tender colonisers, giving it back the purpose of its design. He plans his novel, with Fiamma a new Philip, listening to his ideas, laughing encouragement. Hulme at Cambridge — sent down — then in London, he writes. After a row over a girl, he hangs Wyndham Lewis upside-down on the railings of Soho Square. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the artist, forges him a pair of brass knuckle-dusters which he uses to drive home philosophical arguments.

One evening they go down to Doney’s for a digestivo. Fiamma drinks three glasses of Frangelico as the white-coated waiters dip and bend around them. The room glitters with marble tables and chandeliers, coruscating brightness. Everyone seems to know Fiamma, who is wearing the same yellow dress she wore the first time Esmond saw her. Late on, just as the waiters are beginning to stack chairs, one of them performing a pas de deux with his broom, Fiamma reaches across to take Esmond’s hand on the silver-topped table.

‘When I was young,’ she says, ‘I was hungry. My father couldn’t get work — it was the first years of Mussolini’s reign and the papers suddenly refused to take articles from a Communist, even one who’d fought in the war, and who wrote so beautifully.’ She reaches up to draw her fingers down the sleek curve of her hair. ‘My early memories are of being cold and hungry, and of there never being any money, of having to go to our neighbours to beg food.’ They both lift their feet as the dancing waiter sweeps beneath their table. Fiamma lets out a little sigh. ‘We’d come to Florence for holidays, my mother and I, and there’d be food and soft sheets and my Fascist uncle, and I hated myself for loving it, for not staying in the apartment in Milan with my father. I still feel that, here, a little.’ She shrugs, swirls her glass and drinks it down.

When they get back to the apartment there is a moment of awkwardness at the door to her room. He leans to kiss her cheek, they move their heads the same way, then again, and their lips brush together. They draw apart, eyes wide. Fiamma smiles, and moves to place another swift kiss on his mouth. He is wordless, all lips, staring at the blank face of her door.

14

He wakes at dawn, the air in his bedroom close and stale. The rumble of a taxi below. A muttered conversation, banging doors, footsteps on the stairs, then silence. He dozes again and wakes with a start as his door bursts open. In the dim light he makes out a tall figure with thick chestnut hair. Fiamma stands behind him, her arm on the doorframe.

‘Well, turn the light on then. Let’s get a look at you.’ The voice is warmly amused.

Esmond sticks out a hand for the light and looks blinkingly towards the doorway. The young man is sportif in a white boating jacket and slacks, a loose tie. He smiles, and it is like a growl. Fiamma’s nightdress shows the darkness of her skin as she steals happily behind the stranger. Beautiful, Esmond thinks, sitting up.

‘May we come in?’ The young man crosses to the window and throws open the shutters. The world stirs shyly outside. He pulls out the chair, turns it towards the bed and sits. Fiamma perches on the desk behind him, looking first at Esmond, then at him. Esmond is aware that an incipient morning erection is prodding his sheets. He feels childish and Victorian in his nightshirt, his father’s, too large and threadbare at the armpits.

‘Listen,’ the boy says in a loud voice. ‘I want you to know how bloody good you’ve been. Standing to attention at the old man’s bedside, keeping the pip from his tooth and all that. I’ve spoken to Bailey and he says you’ve been a sainted hero. So thanks a million, pal.’

‘You’re Gerald.’ Esmond says, looking for a trace of Goad in the elegant, almost oriental eyes.

‘S’right,’ Gerald says. ‘Bloody good to be back here. And to see this little one.’ He slaps a hand on Fiamma’s thigh and she smiles out a squeal. ‘Too early for breakfast? Procacci’ll open in twenty minutes. Milk rolls and jam. My treat.’

Gerald and Fiamma leave and Esmond sits muddled and sleepy, listening to their voices and laughter echoing through the corridor. He gets up and picks his clothes more carefully than he has all week — a pale lawn shirt and sponge-bag trousers.

He finds them in the courtyard. It is light now, a lemony brightness in the air. As they stroll out into the street, Gerald throws his arm around Esmond’s shoulders.

‘We’re going to have a high old time this summer. No idea what I’ll do when I get back to London, but I intend to be thoroughly debased before I go.’

They walk through the doors to Procacci, whose stooped, trembling owner is letting up the blinds. He nods them in, tucks a dishcloth into his belt and stands behind the counter.

‘Tre panini con confettura, tre caffè, per favore,’ Gerald says. He pulls out a chair from the round marble table for Fiamma and sits down himself, rocking backwards as he draws out his cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’ he asks, holding it towards Esmond. Esmond takes one and leans forward to light it as the owner brings their breakfasts.

‘You’re studying for the bar, aren’t you?’ Esmond says.

‘Rather flunked, I’m afraid. Have you seen inside a law court, Esmond? There’s always one bird looks as if he’s about to split the atom when all he’s thought about for twenty years is roast beef and gravy. A cemetery for the mind, law.’

Later that morning they visit Goad. Gesuina sits knitting as the old man sleeps. She stands up when she sees Gerald, letting out a whimper of pleasure as they embrace. He tilts backwards and lifts her from the floor. Goad wakes, looks over at them and breaks into a smile.

‘You came,’ he says.

Gerald sits by his father and they talk for some minutes in low voices. Then he turns towards them. ‘I think I’ll sit and read to the old man for a while. Listen, it’s going to be a scorcher. Why don’t we head up to L’Ombrellino for a swim later? I’ll meet you chaps up there, say, three?’

Outside, Fiamma reaches into her clutch and draws out a pair of round, wire-framed sunglasses. Esmond takes her arm. As they walk down past the train station, past Santa Maria Novella, he can feel the heat rising from the paving stones. There are speakers mounted around the piazza and Mussolini’s voice cries out as they pass. Fiamma stops, and he watches a group of boatered schoolgirls giggle past in the mirrors of her lenses. Mussolini ends with a shout that is almost a scream. Fiamma walks on, shaking her head.

‘Che palle,’ she says.

15

Esmond lowers himself down between the dodos and into the water. The steps are slick beneath his feet and he moves carefully, spreading the water, deepening the blue and white stripes of his costume. The sun flings across the pool, sparking off the shadowy nooks of the cliff that climbs towards the house. He leans forward, kicks into a breaststroke and opens his eyes. He can see the mosaics on the bottom, a dolphin in turquoise tiles, mermaids, seahorses, starfish. He turns over, surfaces and looks up. Alice Keppel gazes down on him from the terrace, her hands on the parapet wall. She raises an arm.

‘Is it glorious?’

‘I’ll say,’ he agrees, swimming to the edge of the pool. He rests his elbows on the side, looking down over the city, across to where the valley funnels up into the mountains.

Colonel Keppel is coming down from the terrace above, his hand on Fiamma’s back. She is wearing a red bathing costume with a belt of gold rings. She dives into the pool and swims to join Esmond, her hair fanning out behind her. Colonel Keppel sits on the steps at the other end, his barrel chest inside a black costume of coarse wool, his face reddening in the sun.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Fiamma says, kicking her legs. ‘The only place on a day like this. I hope Gerald comes soon.’

They swim for half an hour and then sit in the shadow of the camphor tree by the pool. The butler brings drinks — Negronis, tomato juice, lemonade — and the sun begins to lose some fierceness. Mrs Keppel sits on one of the white iron chairs beside the pool. The city’s bells are tolling four when finally Gerald arrives, his hair damp with sweat, his boating jacket swung over his shoulder and large dark patches at the armpits of his shirt.

‘Darling Gerald,’ Mrs Keppel says, ‘we’ve been waiting for you. You didn’t walk up, did you?’

He smiles bashfully at Esmond and Fiamma and then at Mrs Keppel.

‘I wanted it to be just like the old days.’

‘Every afternoon, all summer long,’ Mrs Keppel sings.

‘I remember running up that hill as if it wasn’t there. Eheu fugaces labuntur anni, eh?’

Mrs Keppel gives him a firm embrace, clutching him to her chest. The Colonel comes and seizes his hand.

‘Do you the deuce of good to walk. Too many soft young chaps — no disrespect, Esmond — think a taxi’s the only way to move. In my day, we’d walk to Bristol to get an appetite for lunch. Now, how’s the old man?’

‘He’s fine, sleeping. He and Gesuina are heading up to Bagni di Lucca tomorrow. A few weeks’ rest and he’ll be back to his old self.’

Mrs Keppel presses a Negroni into his hand and he drinks it, puts his jacket over the back of one of the chairs and begins to unbutton his shirt.

‘I hope you don’t mind, Esmond,’ he says, shrugging off his shirt and beginning to lower his trousers. ‘I have never worn clothes to swim and I don’t intend to start now.’ He takes off his socks and stands in his undershorts. Mrs Keppel looks at him as she looks at the rest of Florence.

‘I remember you swimming here, oh, you must have been thirteen. Length after length, utterly tireless. Mesmerising to watch your skinny body plunging through the water like a merprince.’ Gerald drops his white undershorts, makes his way to the steps and lunges forward. He arrows beneath the surface, a trail of bubbles fizzing behind him, shooting up from the far end with a roar.

‘Oh this is the life! Come on, George, come and have a swim. It’s bloody exquisite.’

With a slap, Colonel Keppel throws himself into the pool and, thrashing the water, swims in a fierce crawl to where Gerald is stretched out on his back in the leafy light. Esmond looks across at Fiamma, who watches them both with faint amusement.

‘We came here all the time as children, Gerald and I. Sometimes we’d swim in the Arno, up past Pontassieve. You think this is hot now, you’ll see in the summer. People drop dead in the street. The tarmac bubbles.’

Gerald comes up and begins to splash Fiamma. They swim off together, and Esmond is left looking down over the trees on the terrace below. He paddles to the shallow end, walks up the steps, and pours himself another Negroni. Fiamma and Gerald and Colonel Keppel are having races in the water, Mrs Keppel watching, laughing and clapping her hands. A few clouds appear over the hills of Fiesole as the sun sinks lower. Church bells toll and, behind them, the tinkle of goat-bells. Esmond watches an aeroplane cut through the sky to the west, extraordinarily high above the mouth of the valley. He downs his drink and looks at the pool. Gerald is balancing Fiamma on his shoulders and turning, both of them shrieking with pleasure, Colonel and Mrs Keppel cheering as they circle. Finally Gerald stumbles, topples, and they disappear with a howling splash under the water.

16

That evening, they step out for dinner as the city’s clerks and secretaries are leaving their offices, calling to one another across the via Tornabuoni, heading for their trams, swinging their briefcases and satchels, laughing and talking.

‘Norman Douglas is the finest mind I’ve met,’ Gerald says as they walk down the hill from L’Ombrellino, their hair still wet, still humming from the Negronis but changed and scented. ‘He’s coming to Piccolo’s,’ he adds, pointing ahead. ‘I just wish I’d known him when he was younger. He’s nearly seventy, you know. Orioli is bloody good value, too. Pinorman, we call them. Inseparable.’

The sun has dropped below the rooftops and Fiamma has her shawl around her shoulders. Esmond watches her hair flow from shop window to shop window as they pass. Gerald is in his suit, pink handkerchief spilling from his breast pocket. He stands aside to let two carabinieri march by, their swords clacking, capes puffed out by the breeze off the river.

They take the swaying tram to the Piazza Costanzo Ciano, Fiamma wishing the driver a buona sera as they descend. Children are noisily playing, someone is listening to a wireless in one of the apartments above, windows and shutters open to the evening.

‘It’ll be dreadful grub,’ Gerald says as they enter the square. ‘Douglas grew up in Austria, no idea of good food. Only reason he comes to this place is because the chef was trained in the Vorarlberg.’

‘It is worth it for the company,’ Fiamma says, and they smile at each other.

They make their way down a narrow alley and into a courtyard where a sign sways gently above an oleander hedge. A sad-faced maître d’ greets them at the door, bowing deeply to Fiamma. Despite the heat, he leads them into the stuffy, candlelit room where Douglas and Orioli sit at one end of a long table. Reggie Temple is with them. A waiter hovers over Douglas with a dish in his hand whose contents the old man inspects carefully. He looks up as they enter.

‘Ah. All right! Come on, sit down. I’m bartering with this crook over the scampi. Fresh today from Forte dei Marmi. Look like a little boy’s tom tiddler, don’t they?’ He bangs the table and gives a nod of his head. ‘Va bene!’ He lights a Toscano cigarillo and grins.

Esmond sits down between Orioli and Reggie. Douglas is embracing Gerald with a cry of ‘He’s all right, this man!’ Fiamma sits at the end of the table and lifts the shawl from her shoulders, bare skin above a green and white polka-dot dress. She looks a little nervous, and very beautiful. Esmond smiles at her, feels a blush.

‘I bet you’re glad to have young Gerald out here now, eh?’ Douglas says, fixing Esmond in a stare. ‘Must have been hellish boring in that place with only old Goad for company.’

‘Fiamma was there,’ says Esmond, looking down the table at her again.

‘Ah yes, but not the same as having a man there. You know Pino and I have a walkie-talkie system between our rooms? Sort of speaking funnel at the head of each bed. Means if we wake in the night with some 4 a.m. satori, we can yell it out to the other before it’s lost.’

There are two bottles of cheap Soave on the table and Orioli fills all of their glasses to the brim. He never stops smiling, looking first at Douglas, then Gerald, then off into the distance, an expression of constant, wistful benevolence. Reggie has drawn out a little sandalwood box and is showing it to Fiamma, who peers in and pulls a face.

‘I design these,’ he says, holding the box up to Esmond. Painted inside the lid is the scene of a medieval torture chamber, a young boy stretched out on a rack, the masked torturer attacking his groin with pincers. ‘I sell them to tourists.’

‘Gosh,’ Esmond says, passing it carefully back.

‘Oscar Wilde was a dear, dear friend of mine, you know. I had a small but not inconsequential part in The Ideal Husband.’ Reggie opens one of the buttons of his high-necked serge jacket and looks appealingly at Esmond.

The food arrives. Scampi in breadcrumbs; a bollito misto of tongue, beef, capon, sausage; saltimbocca; grey truffles in cheese sauce in sizzling pannikins; wild boar agrodolce. The tragic-looking maître d’ appears with a pepper pot that he grinds as if he were wringing a man’s neck. Douglas’s appetite is vast; half-standing and arcing genially across the table, he makes sure to snare the best cuts of meat, the juiciest prawns. He takes long swigs of his wine as he eats, his nose growing redder, and he begins to talk in close whispers to Gerald, who eats little and places his hand on Douglas’s every so often.

After a while, a pale man in his thirties comes to the restaurant, frayed and shiny as his suit. He looks around the room and then over at their table with a desperate beam.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Douglas mutters. ‘Eric, dear boy, come and join us, won’t you?’

The man takes a seat next to Gerald and nods doubtfully around the table.

‘Eric Wolton’s an old pal. Back when I had a wife.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Happiest day of my life, the day my wife died. Did I ever tell you I danced on her grave? A Scottish jig. Don’t tell my sons that, if you see them. Do you ever see them, in London?’

When they finish eating, Orioli turns to Esmond and puts his hand on his knee. His breath is sweet and heavy on Esmond’s cheek.

‘I think we will be very good friends,’ he says. ‘Norman likes you. I like you. It is so nice to have you and Gerald here. Tell me all about Esmond.’

Esmond stutters, looking across at the round spectacles, the tubby cheeks.

‘I went to school at Winchester, then Cambridge, though only for a year and a half—’

‘Winchester?’ Douglas shouts down the table, breaking off his conversation with Gerald. ‘I loathe the public school system. Creates kinds, not characters. Dr Arnold has a lot to answer for. That merciless pruner of the spirit prevented the upper classes, who were barmy, from feeling comfortable in their skins. We have ceased to be mad, the English. None but a flatterer would still call us eccentric.’

‘I thought Winchester was ghastly,’ Esmond replies, looking straight at Douglas. ‘Full of ugly, small-minded teachers, tuppeny tyrants, taking out their disappointments on the sons of equally catastrophic minor aristocrats and merchant bankers and retired colonels.’

‘Why d’you still wear a Wykehamist’s tie then?’

‘So when I hang myself, they’ll know why I did it.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Douglas shouts and the table laughs. ‘He’s all right!’ Douglas lifts his glass as Esmond turns back to Orioli.

‘I’m here to help Mr Goad set up a radio station. To finance my father’s political party. He’s the Chairman of the British Union.’

Orioli raises his eyebrows.

‘And you’re a Fascist, too?’

‘I’m not really sure, these days.’

Orioli removes his hand from Esmond’s knee and polishes his spectacles on his napkin. More wine is poured. The restaurant begins to fill with young couples staring at each other over candlelight; a family of grandparents, parents and a boy of six or seven in a sailor costume; an old man reading La Nazione with a plate of cannelloni.

‘Strindberg!’ Douglas shouts and bangs the table. ‘That’s what I call the maître d’. Because he looks so dashed mournful, worse than Eric over here. Strindberg, bring us the bill.’

When it comes, Douglas holds it under a candle and makes a few marks with his pencil. ‘Twelve lire each,’ he says. ‘I’d love to treat you all, of course, but money is very tight at the minute.’

Wolton, who has neither eaten nor drunk, passes a handful of notes towards them. On the way out, they stop at the table where the young boy in his sailor’s suit sits, looking pleased to be out with the adults, listening carefully to something his grandmother is saying. Douglas pulls over a chair to sit beside him and, quite naturally, lifts him onto his knee.

‘Permesso?’ he says, smiling at the boy’s father.

‘Si, Professore,’ the man replies.

The little boy looks up at Douglas with wide, delighted eyes.

‘Ma come ti chiami?’

‘Dante,’ the little boy replies, grinning bashfully.

‘Magnifico! Ma dov’è Beatrice?’ Douglas pretends to look under the table, and now in the little boy’s pockets. The boy giggles and simpers up at him.

Reggie Temple leans over and whispers to Esmond with a hiss.

‘It’s frightful. He’s like the Pied Piper. Wherever he goes, the boys just flock to him. One of the reasons he’s so short of money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The queue of parents wanting restitution. He holds competitions for the gypsy kids under the arches of the Ponte alle Grazie. Fifty centimes to whoever can gism first. It’s not dignified, a man of his age.’

Orioli, who has been listening, elbows Temple in the ribs. ‘You’re just jealous. It’s been a long time since anyone looked your way. And Norman is older than you, is he not?’

Douglas presents the father with his card and rests his hands on Dante’s shoulders. The man beams gratefully and insists on introducing his wife and her parents. Reggie tuts and shakes his head while Douglas bows and coos in a Florentine dialect. Finally, the group make their way out and hail taxis on the Piazza.

An hour later, Esmond is sitting on the little balcony of Douglas’s top-floor flat on the Lungarno delle Grazie, looking at the villas on the opposite bank of the Arno, the outline of cypress trees like feathers in the caps of the hills. He is smoking, tapping his ash onto the awning of the Davis & Orioli bookshop two floors below. Douglas comes out of the drawing room, where Schubert is playing on the gramophone.

‘Ma la notte sperde le lontananze,’ he says, sitting down beside Esmond and lighting a Toscano. ‘Night dispels distances. Ungaretti. Will you be with us in Florence for some time?’

‘It depends, I suppose, on how long it takes to set up the radio station. A year or two, perhaps more if it’s a success.’

‘How terribly dull for you. I can’t stay in one place for more than a few months. I am bored stiff with Florence. I should like to get further away, out of Europe, but money is very tight just now. You wouldn’t like to buy one of my books, by any chance?’

He reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out a slim volume with a mottled gold-brown cover.

‘Paneros,’ he says. ‘Aphrodisiacs. The search for an elixir of youth and of sex. It’s about death, too. Because without death there would be no sex, d’you see?’

‘I think so.’ A gibbous moon is rising over the hills, reflected in the fast waters of the Arno.

‘Thirty-five lire usually, but twenty to you.’

Esmond opens his wallet and counts out the notes.

‘Jolly good,’ Douglas says, handing him the book. ‘Gerald tells me you’re a writer yourself.’

‘Actually, I’m trying to use this time to work out if I’m any good.’

‘I didn’t write a novel until I was forty-two. Would have been no point, I hadn’t lived enough. Before that I was all biology, geography, a paper on the pumice stone industry.’

Esmond smiles.

‘Oh, yes. Helped to gaol a gang of child labour racketeers, that one. It was read aloud at the trials in Messina. But fiction? No, you need money in the bank for fiction.’

He turns his head, which seems to Esmond like a statue in the moonlight: hewn and marmoreal.

‘Forsake books,’ he says. ‘Go out among people and nature and think it through for yourself. Keep a diary, if only dates and places. But more than anything, don’t scatter the gold of your youth. Don’t lose your life in books. Get out and live. Michael Arlen said of me — or was it Ronald Firbank? One of them said I was the least literary writer they’d ever met. That I might as well have been a lumberjack.’

Esmond smiles again. ‘I used to write with a friend of mine, the one in Austria. I find it very hard to know if anything I write’s any good without showing it to him. He gave me the necessary confidence.’

He pictures Philip in his digs in Park Terrace, chopping benzedrine tablets into the wine on the desk. The electric moment when he handed over the notebook, and Philip sprawled on the bed, whistling and smiling, his Cambridge-blue eyes galloping over the pages as he read.

‘I never show my work to anyone,’ Douglas says. ‘Writing’s like shitting. If someone’s cheering you on, it’s hard to get going, but give it time and space and it’ll come. And by the way, if you don’t eat well, you won’t shit well.’ He pauses. ‘Did you love this chap?’

Esmond turns to look out over the river. It is past eleven. A gentle breeze is blowing, stirring the hillside and making tight waves on the surface of the water.

‘I still do, I suppose,’ he says.

‘And where is he now?’ Douglas’s voice is suddenly very soft, very kind, like the breeze.

‘He went back to Austria. I think his parents were trying to emigrate to America. I haven’t heard from him for a little while.’

‘Ah, a Jew? Rotten business this. Shames a once-great nation. Hitlerism has its roots in the Old Testament, of course. All that pure race nonsense in Ezra and Nehemiah. Germans are dreadful Bible readers. Don’t give up on him, though. It’s good to be in love while you’re writing. Each of my books ripened under the rays of some attachment or other. Unless I am in love I have no impulse to write.’

They are silent for a while, smoking and watching the river. Then Douglas sits forward slowly and puts an arm around Esmond’s shoulders.

‘Are you sure you’re not throwing your lot in with the wrong side?’

‘The station? It’s for my father, for his Party.’

‘Must you?’

‘What’s the alternative? Communism? I’d rather Mussolini than Stalin.’

‘Break free from what you were born into, Esmond. This isn’t you, the politics. Embrace your freedom, embrace the flesh. You should go to Goa. Astonishing place. Why don’t you sail to Goa and write a life of St Francis Xavier? Dee-lish curries. Find yourself an ebony youngling and write in a little timber-framed hut under palm trees. Don’t let your family write the script of your life.’

They sit for a while longer, then go in to join the party. A bottle of Punt e Mes is passed around. Reggie Temple is asleep on the sofa, Pino talking in Italian to Fiamma and Gerald. Wolton sits on his own, hands on knees. Douglas looks down at him and lets out a snort.

‘Why do you insist on coming here, Eric? For God’s sake can’t you see you’re wasting space.’

Wolton’s grey skin colours momentarily but he stares at his hands.

‘Because I love you,’ he says, so softly that he has to repeat it. ‘I love you, Norman.’

‘So you come running after me as if I were a ballet girl? Not on your life! Clear out!’ Douglas picks up his stick and raps it hard against the floor. ‘You were worth talking to twenty years ago. But now? I simply don’t want to see you. Clear out!’

Wolton staggers to his feet. Reggie Temple has woken up and looks out blearily. Wolton moves for the door.

‘Norman, I—’

‘Clear out!’

Ten minutes later, Esmond and the others leave too, Reggie Temple walking with them as far as the Ponte Santa Trinità.‘Such a sad figure, the Wolton feller,’ he says, as they make their way along the deserted Lungarno. ‘Norman’s frightful to him, but I can’t blame him. Shows up here after so many years.’

‘What’s his story?’

‘He was one of Norman’s boys. Norman’s wife caught them buggering in the marital bed some twenty years ago. But he was old for Norman even then. He has a theory, you see, that boys after puberty suffer a loss of body heat. That he ought to sodomise only the very young in order to keep himself youthful.’ He lets out a low chuckle. ‘It’s all in that book of his, Paneros. Quite barmy.’

‘And now Eric’s back.’

‘Yes, after a failed marriage and some kind of collapse, he seemed to think Norman would find him irresistible. Really it is too sad.’

They leave him at the bridge and walk up to the Institute. It is dark and silent inside. They say good night, each of them a little drunk, a little sombre, and fall asleep, the bats riding the cool air outside their windows.

17

Esmond realises he has been putting off seeing Carità, disgusted and, he admits to himself, scared by what the little man did to Goad. He would rather face his father and Mosley at once than a brute like Carità. But there is no word from England, nothing from Goad, and so he keeps his head down, waiting, thumbing through The Wireless Operator’s Handbook whenever he feels particularly guilt-stricken.

One morning, a Saturday, Fiamma comes into Esmond’s room early. She sits at the end of the bed in the darkness. He sees that she’s crying as he pulls himself awake.

‘What is it?’

‘They’ve killed Carlo and Nello in Paris. Oh, Esmond—’ She reaches over to take him in her arms and begins to sob. After a while he regretfully disentangles himself, stands to open the window, and looks back to see her slumped on the bed with her fingers in her hair. It is another hot day; the room is close, the breeze warm and dusty from the street. He sits beside her in his nightshirt and places an arm around her, whispering softly.

‘Who were they? Died how?’

‘Friends of my father. They founded Giustizia e Libertà. Heroes—’ She unravels into tears. Esmond finds a handkerchief in a drawer and offers it to her, but she pushes it away, drawing her arm across her face. He picks up her hand and clasps it between his own.

‘Who killed them?’

‘Fascists,’ she spits at him. She begins to speak very swiftly. ‘They are taking everything from me,’ she says. ‘First my father, then the house I grew up in. My friends, who are either running off to join them, or in gaol because they won’t. They took dear, gentle Goad. Now Carlo and Nello.’ She bangs her hand down on the bed and turns to him. ‘I never understood what it meant, totalitarianism. You have this word in English, too?’ He nods uncertainly. ‘They are intruding into every aspect of my life, taking over all the things that are dear to me just as they took over Libya and Abyssinia. I hate them, Esmond.’

Gerald comes into the room. Fiamma looks up at him damply.

‘Where were you?’ she says. ‘I came looking for you this morning but you weren’t in bed.’

He kneels down beside her.

‘I’m so bloody sorry. I saw it on the front page of the Nazione. It was the Cagoule, of course, the French Fascists. On Musso’s orders. Bastards.’

She wipes her face again with a slippery arm.

‘Listen,’ he says, with a doggish grin, ‘I’ve something to cheer you up. Get dressed and meet me in the courtyard. Come on, Fiamma. There you go.’

Esmond pulls on shorts and an Aertex shirt, brushes his teeth and knocks on Fiamma’s door. They make their way down the stone steps to the courtyard as darkness lifts off the city. Gerald is standing in the cloister opposite the entrance to Cook’s, a large canvas bag at his feet. Behind him, leaning on their stands, are three bicycles. One is a racer — a Romeo — the other two are Peugeot tourers. Gerald stands back with a flourish.

‘Thought we could use them to get out of town, find a cool spot along the river. I saw them in the barn at L’Ombrellino and knew George wouldn’t miss them. Couple of the gardeners helped me wheel them down this morning. D’you want the racer, Esmond?’

Esmond holds its lean, crouched frame, grey with red livery. He pats the leather seat.

‘It’s super,’ he says.

The three of them set off wobblingly towards the river. Fiamma is still crying quietly, hiccoughs escaping as she pedals. It is before nine, but already the sun is powerful overhead, searing as they gather pace along the Lungarno. At the Ponte Vecchio they pass tinkers with fly-bothered mules, beggars in the shadows, fishermen pushing ice-filled trolleys of their catch towards the Mercato Nuovo. The rich have left for their out-of-town villas or the Alps, the poor sit indoors with their fans, their windows open, their feet in tubs of ice-water. A group of Fascist Youth walk along the river in a bedraggled crocodile behind a little man in a heavy black shirt. He is sweating so much he barely sees the bicycles coming and has to leap, cursing. The boys behind him laugh.

‘My uncle,’ Fiamma shouts over her shoulder. ‘He is in charge of the Sabato Fascista today. Poor boys—’

On the towpath of the river the air is cooler, the wind fresh from the Apennine peaks, finding its way into the folds of their clothing, the nooks of their bodies. Esmond races ahead, pumping his legs, head down, lets out a joyful shout that’s muffled by the wind. Gerald rides with no hands, arms held up, cupping the breeze. They stop for a drink of water before crossing the river at the ford at San Jacopo al Girone, poppies in the wheat field behind them.

Fiamma, wheat-dust blanching her lips, walks waist-high to the fragile flowers and picks a handful. She puts them into the basket of her bicycle and, halfway across the stony rise of the ford, she drops them into the water.

‘For Carlo and Nello,’ she says.

Along the south bank of the river, through more wheat and corn and maize, then steeper ground, vineyards stretching up into the low reaches of the hills. They join the road, through small villages — Candelli, Santa Monica, Vallina — where old men sit on the stoops of their houses watching them pass, their eyes crinkled from contemplating the long moment of their lives. Under every roadside tree stands a mule, swatting its tail placidly against the flies. In the fields heavy cattle swing their heads like slow church bells. They buy apricots from a stall where a young woman with a baby on her hip chews a stalk of grass beneath her hat and addresses them in Florentine dialect so thick that even Fiamma can’t understand her.

Finally, they turn off the road and down a track to the river. They come to an abandoned watermill with a crenellated roof like a castle. Martins have nested in its walls, opening large clefts. The whole building looks about to crumble down the bank into the Arno.

‘The Gualchiere di Remole,’ Gerald says. ‘This would have turned wool into cloth. Hugely important to Florence in the Middle Ages. The Comune is always promising to turn it into a museum but, I mean, look at it.’

Past the mill, they cycle carefully along an overgrown path to the river. Brambles tear at Esmond’s legs as he follows. He stops to help Fiamma unhook her dress from a thorn that snags it and sees the white and red scratches the brambles have raised on her legs. They come out on fine yellow sand beneath the lip of the bank. Upstream of the mill, the river is pocked with small islands and the Arno is wide and clear. They lay their bicycles down in the grass.

Gerald unpacks the canvas bag: a thermos of Soave, two bottles of red, some bread and salami. He takes a knife and cuts the salami as Esmond and Fiamma paddle, looking across the river to where contadini labour in the fields, their backs pomegranate brown. The river is hard and sandy on their feet and slopes towards the middle where fish flicker like shadows.

‘Lunch is served, you two. Come and get it.’

An hour later they lie lazily fuddled on the sand. The thermos is empty, and they have started on the red. Esmond is aware that he is sunburning, his head beginning to throb in the heat, but he can barely lift his arm to cover it. Gerald has taken off his top and is using it for a pillow, lifting himself up on his elbow to take a gulp of wine every so often. Fiamma is sleeping, twitching, sometimes turning. Only the electric thrum of cicadas stirs the air, the bray of a mule or the shouts of contadini.

‘We should swim or we’ll boil here,’ Gerald says. As he stands, Esmond can see sweat in the tufts of dark hair beneath his arms, across his chest. He walks down to the water. Fiamma has woken and stretches, frowning. Gerald drops his shorts and underpants, leaving them in a coil on the bank, and plunges into the water. He comes up in the centre of the river, blowing gouts of water out of his mouth and laughing.

‘You should come in! It’s marvellous.’

Esmond looks over at Fiamma. She stares, unfocused, a hectic flush to her cheeks.

‘It is hot,’ he says.

‘Go on, then.’

He walks down to the edge of the water. His shirt is sticking to his back. He lifts it off with difficulty, takes down his shorts and then, suddenly delighted to think of his body immersed in the cool water, strips naked and leaps forward into the river. He swims towards Gerald who is floating, spreadeagled. He dives and opens his eyes: it is clear and green and as he goes deeper, icy. Sunlight arrows down and he can make out Gerald floating above, the smooth curve of his back, his hair flaming out, his arms and legs paddling him gently afloat. He comes up beside him, laughing.

‘There’s nothing like it, is there?’ Gerald says. ‘Come on, Fiamma! Come and cool down.’

She takes a final swig of wine, stands and shakes her head, then steps down to the river’s edge. She unpins her hair and it tumbles down to her shoulders. She lifts the skirt of her dress up over her head and stands for a moment in her bra and smalls.

‘Nello’, she says, ‘used to take me swimming. When I was still a little girl.’ Esmond and Gerald watch her and she meets their gaze. She steps in, the whiteness of her underclothes striking against the darkness of her arms and legs. She swims towards them.

They are careful of each other at first. Esmond looks down at his body, caressed by the same water, swimming in the wake of skin scurf and sweat that links them. He and Gerald dive underwater. They all know these submarine plunges are intended to catch better glimpses of each other, the arrangement of limbs. Gerald’s nakedness, which had come to seem natural by the swimming pool at L’Ombrellino, is changed by the fact that he, Esmond, is naked himself. He thinks his friend looks like a Greek sea god, Proteus or Glaucus, and Fiamma a nereid.

They swim downstream to one of the islands that prods up from the river near the mill. Gerald is the first to pull himself out onto the sand. Esmond does his best to leave the water gracefully and sits down, the sand warm and soft beneath him. Then Fiamma joins them, elbowing herself a place between them. At the touch of her skin, Esmond feels a warm jolt of longing in his groin and has to turn over and lie on his front. The water evaporates from their bodies as the sun moves across the sky.

‘It must be nearly four,’ Esmond says.

‘I’m going to swim to the other bank,’ says Gerald. ‘See what’s over there.’

Esmond watches Fiamma through half-closed eyes and the strong sound of Gerald’s strokes. There is a slight reddening under her brassiere, on the tops of her thighs where she has allowed the sun to catch her. He realises she is looking back at him, that she can tell he is watching her. He reaches up and moves his finger over her lips; she smiles at the contact and then bites him.

‘Turn over,’ she says.

He opens his eyes. ‘No.’

‘Turn over, Esmond. I’ve had a terrible day.’

He lifts his head and sees that Gerald is much further upstream, bobbing in the silver reflection of the sun. He turns. He and Fiamma stare downwards. She smiles, not taking her eyes from his gently pulsing cock. Carefully, she lays a soft hand on it, closes her fingers and leans over to kiss him. Her lips have the warm tackiness of a child’s. She draws back and then bows to place a kiss at the place where his cock emerges from her clenched fist. She leaves her lips there. A long slice of time. He hears voices, splashing. Fiamma raises her head and they look upstream.

Gerald is swimming towards them. On the bank, running and waddling, red-faced and bellowing, holding what look like branches, comes a group of seven or eight contadini.

‘Swim for the shore, you two,’ Gerald shouts. ‘Quickly!’

Esmond helps Fiamma to her feet and they move swiftly into the river and towards the beach. Gerald is already there, pulling on his clothes and filling the canvas bag with their picnic. Esmond takes great handfuls of water and is on the bank, his cock still half-hard. He turns to see Fiamma ten metres from shore. In the other direction, the red-faced contadini are almost upon them, shouting and cursing.

‘Get on your bike,’ says Gerald, ‘I’ve got your clothes.’

Fiamma is staggering up the beach and Gerald puts the bike in her hands. The contadini stop for a moment, nonplussed to have landed their quarry so easily. Esmond realises they are not holding branches but nettles, grasped at the stem. The leader, a squat, paunchy fellow of fifty or so, steps towards them.

‘Deliquenti! Furfanti!’ he shouts, and whips one of the nettles across Esmond’s back.

Another steps towards Fiamma and slashes at her thighs as she tries to mount her bike. ‘Putana!’ he cries. Esmond makes to get down from his bicycle.

‘No, Esmond. Just go!’ Gerald is already heading up the path towards the mill.

‘You first,’ Esmond shouts to Fiamma, and she pedals furiously up the rocky slope, brambles scything at her legs.

Esmond is last, nettle-whips raining on his back until he crests the hill to the mill’s forecourt. They pick up speed and pull away. Only when they are back on the main road, cycling past the woman selling peaches at her stall, does Esmond realise he is still naked, Fiamma in her damp and muddy underwear. He looks ahead to see the muscles of her thighs working, the jounce of her breasts as she pedals, and he cycles up beside her with a long whoop of pleasure. Soon Fiamma is laughing too and they race along the road, the wind and warm sun bathing them, Fiamma’s hair streaming behind her like steam.

18

Back at the Institute, they sit out on the loggia as the sky fades around them.

‘Vodka and the last of Gesuina’s lemonade, doctor’s orders,’ Gerald says, and they sip, stretching their tingling limbs, Gerald swirling his drink and looking out over the rooftops.

‘It’s easy to forget how conservative they are, the contadini. They couldn’t care less about a revolutionary government. It’s why the aristocrats are still so popular.’

‘Hasn’t Mussolini banned indentured labour?’ Esmond asks, reaching to touch his shoulders with his glass.

Gerald considers his drink. ‘The spirit lingers.’

‘I thought they were going to kill us,’ Fiamma says.

‘Did one of them have a pitchfork?’ Esmond laughs. ‘Or did I imagine it?’

Gerald stands up. ‘I need a piss.’

Esmond and Fiamma are left on the terrace. She leans and looks at the sky.

‘I keep thinking about them,’ she says.

‘The contadini?’

‘Carlo and Nello. They were stabbed to death, you know.’ She’s silent for a while. ‘How hard they must have fought. I keep trying to imagine how their faces looked.’ She looks at him. ‘Promise me one thing, Esmond.’

‘Anything,’ he says.

‘Promise me that you’re not one of them, not one of the bastardi who did this to my friends.’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘You know what I mean.’

He pauses for a moment and then takes her hand. ‘I do know, of course. I grew up with it, you understand.’

‘That’s not enough. It’s not right, or decent. It’s not you.’

Gerald comes back and they sit under the swooping bats and the stars until San Gaetano strikes twelve and, drunk, they stumble towards bed. Outside her room, Fiamma pauses.

‘I’m never going to sleep in this heat. Will someone rub some Pond’s Cream on my shoulders? I feel like I’m on fire.’

‘Yes,’ say Esmond and Gerald at the same time, stepping forward and following her into her room. Esmond remembers seeing her at her dressing table, the way her hair fell down her back, the reflection of her breasts in the mirror. Then he thinks of her body earlier on the sand, her lips. She has turned on the bedside lamp and her skin looks extraordinarily dark in the light.

‘Do this, will you?’ she says to Gerald, turning so he can unzip her dress at the back. Esmond watches her slip out of the straps and pull it down to her waist. She sits at the table of her dresser and he wonders if she’s deliberately recreating that initial glimpse, the scorcio he’d caught through the door three months ago. She unhooks the clasp of her brassiere, crossing her arms over her chest and smiling coyly over her shoulder.

‘Now, Gerald.’ She reaches back and hands him the cream then leans forward, her hands on the dresser. Esmond can see the heavy curve of her breasts in the mirror, dark circled nipples, the beginning of a grin on her face as Gerald rubs the cream into her neck and her back. She lets out a long sigh, which begins as a shiver, and ends in a definite moan.

After a few minutes, she raises her head, stands up and turns around. Her eyes are bright, her hair falling in sweat-damp tails to her shoulders. She looks like a goddess, with her burnished skin and bare breasts, a dark Venus.

‘I think Esmond is the most sunburnt,’ she says, looking over at him.

Gerald grins. ‘I agree. Kit off, Lowndes. Come and lie on the bed.’

Stumbling, laughing, Esmond takes his shirt and trousers off. He lies down on the bedspread in his briefs, his face pressed into Fiamma’s pillow, smelling her scent and hair. The first of the cream is almost painfully cold against his skin. But then the hands, indistinguishable and swift across his body, begin to smooth and caress and he closes his eyes and gives himself over to the pleasure.

When he opens them again, he realises he has been asleep. The lamp is extinguished and there is only the low light of the moon from the door to the corridor. His briefs have been removed and his cock stirs gently between his legs. He is lying against the wall and beside him on the bed, Gerald is naked on his back, Fiamma pressing cream along him. Gerald groans every so often. Esmond lies there, hardly breathing, eyes half-closed, watching. Fiamma sucks in her lower lip, pausing when her hands reach the centre of Gerald’s body. Esmond realises she has taken the dress off completely and shifts to get a better look. She stops, Gerald turns, Esmond smiles foolishly.

‘I fell asleep,’ he says, but Gerald pushes a finger to his lips and then reaches across to kiss him. Fiamma clambers over to lie on top of the two boys and Esmond feels her fingers close around his cock again. She slides downwards, guiding him into the damp warmth of her and then it is just flesh and sweat and spit, the warm breach of a mouth, the slippery press of a tongue, hot breath panting, laughing, groaning. They melt into the sweating night and into each other. By dawn, they are nothing but husks of bodies on the bed, burnished with sweat, sheets torn to the floor. A jug of water lies shattered on the tiles, its contents soaking into the sheets. Fiamma sleeps with her mouth open, her head on Gerald’s chest, one arm around Esmond. Their limbs have been shuffled, redistributed; they might be one spiritless creature. The bells of San Gaetano chime for matins, but they sleep on in sluggard happiness.

19

‘Come on Esmond, up we get.’ Gerald has opened the blinds and sunlight streaks into the room. Fiamma rubs her eyes and stares down at the wreckage on the floor. Esmond stretches, looks over at Gerald, who is dressed and carrying a mug of coffee.

‘Leave us alone,’ he says, trying to pull the pillow over his head.

‘Not a chance. You and I are going to church. Bailey was a real brick to the old man while he was in hospital and we haven’t so much as glanced at him since. You’ve got twenty minutes to get vertical.’

Esmond bathes in cold water, his head pounding, mouth dry. He sinks down beneath the surface for a moment and blows bubbles out of his nose. He dresses quickly, hands shaking as he knots his tie. He looks into Fiamma’s room, whispers goodbye to her sleeping body and then walks down to meet Gerald in the courtyard.

The church is emptier than the last time, despite the worshippers from Holy Trinity. As he steps through the wicket gate and down the aisle, Esmond discovers in himself an affection for the gloomy place, for its tortured paintings. Gerald bows deeply before the altar, crossing himself, and then takes a seat near the front, Esmond beside him.

‘Love the decor,’ Gerald says, nodding towards the triptych. ‘Fucking terrifying. Just what you need in church.’

Esmond smiles. He makes a rough calculation: their combined age, he thinks, still less than half that of anyone else in the congregation. Bailey beams when he sees them, and Esmond senses a verve and bluster to the sermon, a twinkle as they go up to take communion.

During the slow, prayerful parts of the service, Esmond feels Gerald breathing beside him and, looking at the slim-fitting suit on his thigh, remembers his head in Esmond’s lap, grinning wolfishly; Fiamma perched above them, her legs apart showing slick darkness, swaying; he remembers how, at one point, the two of them had pinned him down, taken turns to have him inside them, Gerald letting a silver string of spit down onto the tip of his cock beforehand. He feels a hot rush to his face as he realises he must stand for the Peace and carefully adjusts himself through the fabric of his pocket. Gerald looks at him and grins.

After the service, they wait for Bailey while he and Reggie Turner clear up. Gerald stands looking at the triptych, a warm detachment on his face. Esmond lounges in the pew, longing for his bed, wondering what it will be like to see Fiamma again. Now Bailey bounces down towards them from the sacristy, rubbing his hands. Esmond had forgotten how big he was, how his body seemed out of place in the small, dark church.

‘How’ve you chaps been? Any word from your father, Gerald?’

They walk out and into the entrance hall with its faded notices and plaques.

‘I telephoned him on Friday. He says he’s better, although he sounded awfully tired. Gesuina tells Fiamma that the doctors are still in a dither. I’m going to catch the bus up there next week, see for myself.’

‘Why don’t you let me drive you? Always good to give the Alfa a run. Hold on a minute, Esmond.’ Bailey takes him by the elbow. He can smell the priest’s cologne, feel the strength in the fingers that close around him. ‘There’s something I wanted to show you,’ he says, guiding him up the stairs. ‘You come too, Gerald. It’ll give you something to tell your father, buck him up.’

They make their way up the stone steps and then along the corridor to the room overlooking the Piazza Santo Spirito. Esmond pauses for a moment, allowing Bailey and Gerald to pass in front of him. He thinks of the airless feel of Aston Magna, the ancient dust of his prep school at West Down.

‘Ecco là,’ Bailey says, opening the door to the studio.

Esmond steps into the room and lets out a gasp. The studio is no longer empty. A walnut desk, a pair of microphones. A silver cross-hatch BBC standard, a direct-to-disc recorder. An RCA sound-mixing desk and reel-to-reel electromagnetic tape machine sit on a chest of drawers. Against the far wall, hiding the mould patches Esmond had noticed before, stands a large cupboard with what looks like a transmitter. There are wires spewing out from the front, a series of parts, screwdrivers, spanners and a hammer on the mantelpiece.

‘What do you think?’ Bailey asks, smiling broadly at him.

‘This is amazing, bloody brilliant. How did you manage—’

‘Not my doing at all. Ada’s the miracle worker. She rounded up some engineer friends at the university. They did this for next to nothing. It’s her you should thank.’

Esmond runs his hand along the desk, looks at the reels on the tape machine, lifts the needle on the recorder, blows dust from the disc.

‘How fabulous.’ And then, grinning as it dawns on him, ‘We never have to see Carità again.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I must— Do you know where Ada lives?’

‘The Liuzzis are over in Le Cure. I’ll have the address downstairs.’

‘I’ll go and see her now. This is just— It’s perfect.’

He leaves Gerald at the Institute and makes his way alone along the via dei Cerretani, past the Duomo and up towards Le Cure. As he strolls through the warm afternoon, he realises how much Carità had been casting his angry shadow over things. He feels a swell of gratitude for Ada.

The Liuzzi apartment is at the top of a glum, grey house overlooking the gardens of the Villa Ventaglio. A tall man stoops to the door. He carries a book in one hand and looks at Esmond over half-moon glasses.

‘Si, posso aiutarvi?’ he says.

‘Buongiorno,’ says Esmond. ‘I’m here to see Ada. I’m Esmond Lowndes.’

‘Come, please,’ the man says, opening the door. ‘I will call her. I have heard a great deal about you. About Radio Firenze. Ada! Vieni qui!’

There is the sound of hurried footsteps and Ada appears. She is wearing the same peasant’s linen tunic, her red hair reminds him again of Mary Magdalene in the triptych. She runs a hand through it, pulling strands behind her ears, and looks suddenly bashful, a flush flooding her cheeks. He notices the small, fragile mole below her left eye. Her father clears his throat.

‘I wanted to say—’ he says, ‘I am sorry about Mr Goad. But you British must understand. This is not your city. We will not be another pink-shaded nation. Excuse me, I must get back to work. Ring the bell for Lydia if you need anything.’ Ada leads Esmond into a gloomy, book-cluttered drawing room. Copies of La Nostra Bandiera, the newspaper her father publishes, are stacked by the French windows, cuttings spread out on the coffee table, on the floor. Ada sits down primly, hands on her knees. Esmond goes to the window and looks out over the trees of the park in front of the house.

‘Listen, what you did at St Mark’s—’

‘No,’ she interrupts him. ‘Let me speak first.’ She looks at him nervously again. ‘It was my fault,’ she says. ‘What happened to Signor Goad.’

Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘I told my father that I had been invited to the drinks party at the Institute. I was going to celebrate the coronation with you. He was very angry. He doesn’t approve of the British Institute. Hates the British. I’m so sorry, I should have thought—’

‘He wasn’t one of them, your father?’

‘No, he didn’t go, but I know he telephoned Niccolò Arcimboldi. He does everything he can to please. It isn’t as easy for him here as it was in Turin. There is more resistance, you know? To a Jewish Fascist. I should have seen this. Signor Goad, is he very bad?’

She turns, biting her thin upper lip. He thinks about putting his arms around her but sits beside her on the divan with a hand in the small of her back.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Goad will be fine. You couldn’t have known this would happen. And what you’ve done at the church, it’s amazing. We won’t need to see Carità again.’

She smiles. ‘I have some very capable friends. They saw it as a challenge. I was mostly standing around passing tools.’

‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’

‘It was really nothing. We salvaged most of it from the university. Parts no one was using. What I did spend, counts as penance for what happened to Mr Goad. We have another few days’ work before it’s ready—’

‘You’re too kind. We’ll be able to start as soon as Goad returns from hospital. I do hope you’ll be involved. I mean, not just translating, but in the whole project.’

‘I’d like to,’ she says. They sit quietly for a few moments, then he rises, kisses her cheeks and walks out into the hallway. As he makes his way to the front door, she stands looking after him. In the shadows of the corridor behind her he makes out her father, watching him over her shoulder.

That evening, after dinner on the loggia, Gerald and Fiamma and Esmond drink a bottle of wine, a few glasses of grappa. Without speaking much, they bathe together in the large, cool bathroom, splashing about like children and taking turns to soap each other. Esmond had been expecting awkwardness between them, a sense of shame. Instead they fall into bed again like they fall into the water. He feels, with them, rather like the triptych: an obscure work newly attributed to a master. When he finally sleeps, he sleeps with a hollow sound to his gentle snores, utterly quenched, content, dreaming of Gerald and Fiamma.

20

They arrange to meet Pino and Norman at Piccolo’s again and, as they make their way into the restaurant, Esmond wonders if their secret is visible on their faces. If Douglas or Orioli will be able to scent out the change in atmosphere that feels, to him, as if it is banked up in the room around them, a wave about to break. Certainly there had been a coldness in Mrs Keppel’s attitude that afternoon, although the Colonel was delighted when, rather than just Gerald, all three had decided to peel off their clothes and plunge naked into the pool at L’Ombrellino.

They stop going to the galleries in the mornings, choosing instead to lie in bed and recover from the drinking and carousing with Douglas and Orioli; further drinks and dancing with their younger friends at Doney’s or the Circolo Unione in the Palazzo Corsi; then the frantic grasping and thrusting and sucking and biting that, sustained perhaps by the triangulation of their urges, the seemingly limitless possibilities provided by three young bodies equally desired, equally possessed, keep them lost in the hot heaven of Fiamma’s room until the roosters crow over by the Cascine and the swallows start cheeping outside the window.

Gerald goes up to Bagni di Lucca to visit Goad and comes back grim-faced and quiet. Gesuina, he says, pushes his father up and down the streets of the town, from the sanatorium to the baths, from the baths to the sulphur springs, walking the steep streets tirelessly so that Goad might get the freshest, cleanest air. But the old man is still skeletal, eyes shadowed, breath quick and ragged. The doctors have found nothing more than ‘nerves’, a word they repeat in various tones of exasperation and wonder, in a range of evasive accents, shaking their heads.

Esmond continues his novel. Hulme at war. Heroism. Boredom. He has heard his father speak so many times about the deep-throated booming of the guns, the burst of star-shells, trench-foot, trench-mouth, sorties that might as well have been suicides. But he can’t make it come alive. The letters on the page are like bones in a vault, dusty and lifeless. He fills his notebooks, buys more, revises and rewrites, imagining all the time his father reading over his shoulder, tutting and shaking his head and muttering. ‘No. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’

One evening towards the end of August, they are dining with Douglas and Orioli again at Piccolo’s. Both of the Reggies are there, and a new face, offered by Douglas with a sweep of his arm.

‘Prince Heinrich,’ he says of the tall, dashing young man in a suit of blue serge. Esmond shakes his hand. The Prince, fortyish, speaks perfect English, but seems reserved, otherworldly, sitting back and watching as they bellow at each other over the table. Douglas is on coruscating form, bristling when Esmond, who has been reading Paneros, suggests it reminds him of Wilde.

‘Can’t stand the man. Wrong type of sod. I know the Reggies here fight a posthumous battle over who has the misfortune of being the poor bugger’s widow, but he was nothing but words, words and old maid’s ways.’

Esmond learns that Prince Heinrich is the son of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, exiled by Hitler for not agreeing to support a south German military alliance between Bavaria and Austria.

After dinner, Douglas puts his arm around Esmond and guides him away from the others.

‘You’re enjoying Paneros, then?’

‘I’ve almost finished it. And yes, very much.’

‘Good. It’s really, if you like, a hymn to the sexual act. What ecstasy, of all of them, is more fervid than that of young lovers locked in lush embraces? I wanted to put that on the page, to make you feel it as you read it. I can’t read that book without a stiffy, all right!’

Orioli had looked a little jaded during dinner, eating and drinking less than usual. He’d asked Strindberg for a mineral water and drunk it, burping loudly and proffering swift, embarrassed apologies. He trots to catch up with them.

‘I’m not so much tonight. It’s my fegato, my bad liver. I need to go on a diet. Maybe I should go home.’

Douglas gives him a swipe on the buttocks with his walking cane.

‘No slacking. We’re going to join these young ones at their nightclubs. I want to see what they do after leaving us. They’ve been secretive recently. We ought to know what we’re missing.’

They make their way towards the orange dome of the cathedral. Beside the main steps of the Duomo, where indifferent hawkers hold out black-market cigarettes and saucy postcards, Douglas gives a little bark.

‘Let’s go in,’ he says. ‘I want to look at Sir John.’

The Prince and Colonel Keppel wait outside with the Reggies as the three friends follow Douglas and Orioli into the cathedral. It is very dark inside, barely any light through the stained glass from the streetlamps in the square.

‘Bugger,’ Gerald whispers, stubbing his toe on an unseen step. They walk down a side-aisle until they come to a small chapel. Douglas speaks, his voice terribly loud in the echoing church.

‘You see there?’ he says, lighting a match and holding it to one of the prayer candles. ‘Let’s fire up some of these, get a better look.’

As Douglas and Orioli light the candles to the side of the chapel, the fresco on the wall is illuminated. It is the painting in terra verde, the colour of the patina on bronze. A cruel-looking man on a horse atop a triumphant plinth.

‘Sir John Hawkwood,’ Douglas booms. ‘By Uccello. This is my favourite Florentine Englishman. Better than the soft-souls who live here now. A condottiero, a mercenary, in the twelfth century. They couldn’t pronounce his name, so they called him Giovanni Accuto. Fought mainly against Florence, actually, but chose to settle and die here. Bloody tough. Would have taught these Italians a thing or two about war. They could do with him in Spain, in Abyssinia. Bloody wet, the Italians.’

Esmond hears someone clear their throat, the sound of rustling papers. He looks around and, with a start, realises that the nave of the cathedral contains some dozen people, dressed in black. A priest comes hurrying towards them.

‘Signori,’ he says, ‘I really must insist—’

Esmond starts to apologise, but Douglas lifts his chin belligerently to the priest.

‘Lining your pockets with pelf from these sentimental fools. Irrational dunces praying for magic and redemption and hope. God, how I hate the clergy.’ He turns towards the congregation, mainly frightened-looking old women, and booms. ‘It’s all claptrap! Don’t you see it? Making you feel corrupt for the few real pleasures of your miserable lives. Go out and live, don’t waste your final days in here!’ By this time Gerald is hurrying him towards the door and Esmond, mumbled apology, places a five lire note in the collection plate.

In Doney’s, Douglas is loud and quarrelsome, ordering bottle after bottle of cheap Chianti and banging his fist on the table with every detail. He smokes incessantly, his large pale face moving behind the smoke like a moon behind clouds. Prince Heinrich, previously vaguely amused by Douglas, now looks on with a kind of fascinated horror.

‘I switched from girls to boys,’ Douglas says, a group of elderly English spinsters at the table next door nodding to one another, ‘in Naples in ’97. I was bartering with some street girl’s mother. A gypsy girl, up near Scampia.’ He inclines his head to Prince Heinrich. ‘Have you ever undressed a gypsy? They’re always perfectly clean.’ He turns back to the table, making sure the old ladies can hear him. ‘So, I was bargaining with this woman over her daughter when the girl’s brother turned up and gave me the most tremendous clout with a cosh. When I woke, he was covering my face with kisses and tears and I quite forgot about the girl. Disappeared with the boy for a fortnight.’

There is a bustle at the back of the room and Esmond can see Fiamma’s uncle Niccolò with a group of other Blackshirts at the bar, arguing with the bartender. With a lurch, he sees that Carità is amongst them. ‘We should go,’ he says quietly.

A younger Blackshirt, whom Esmond hasn’t seen before, walks slowly to their table. He leans over carefully and picks up Douglas’s glass.

‘You drink too much,’ he says, draining the wine himself and placing it back on the table. ‘Basta così.’

‘Damn fool!’ Douglas yells, his face softened and inflamed. The other Blackshirts gather behind their crony. Esmond sees a look of cold rage on Niccolò Arcimboldi’s face, a smirk on Carità’s, as Douglas begins to shout. ‘Look at you, stuffed up and delighted with yourselves, playing at soldiers. Italians make rotten soldiers, d’you know that? Halfway into an attack and they’re writing to their mothers.’

The young Blackshirt pauses for a moment, as if in thought, then swings a punch at Douglas. The old man topples back, knocking over the table, breaking glass and plates. The English women scream. Esmond thinks of Goad at the unveiling of the portrait, a reeling sense of déjà vu. He aims a swift kick at Niccolò Arcimboldi’s shin. Fiamma has picked up her butter knife and sweeps it wildly at Carità, who ducks. Gerald tries to get Douglas to the door while Pino beats frantically at a wide black back with his friend’s cane, his spectacles misting, a stream of curses in English and Italian. More punches reach Douglas as he staggers towards the door with Gerald. Esmond sees Carità draw a dagger from his belt and, before he has a chance to feel afraid, he picks up one of the empty wine bottles from the table and brings it down over the little man’s head. The bottle shatters, Carità stumbles forward, another Blackshirt takes out a pistol and holds it up. ‘A gun!’ More screaming; the Prince and the Reggies cower in the far corner.

Grabbing Fiamma’s hand, Esmond hustles them towards the door and into the night. Gerald and Douglas are disappearing into the Institute, twenty yards ahead. He looks back and sees the Blackshirts lifting their weapons in the air, shouting, Carità leading them. He drags Fiamma after him, stumbling through the doors of the Institute, which he slams and bolts. Panting, they lean against one another until their breathing slows.

‘We just can’t behave like that any more,’ Fiamma says, shaking her head. ‘Norman is out of control. I felt like hitting him myself.’

When they reach the library, Douglas is sitting in an armchair while Gerald pours him a scotch. The old man’s eyes are bloodshot, a bruise ripening on one cheek, his hands shaking.

‘They’re beasts,’ he says. ‘Brutes. See what they’ve done to my little boys, dressing them up as soldiers, marching and drilling when they should be lying in the sun.’

‘Where’s Pino?’ Fiamma asks.

‘The problem is that Musso’s foisted a political system designed for sober Northern temperaments onto a race of lovers. The Italians are all heart, too much compassion for Fascism—’

He lights a Toscano. Esmond crosses to the window. The Blackshirts aren’t waiting for them, only the old man in the pheasant feather cap sits on the steps of the church opposite, watching. A small crowd stands further up, in the pool of a streetlight outside Pretini’s salon, looking down at a pile of clothes on the ground. When it moves, Esmond wonders if a dog has been hit by a car. Then he sees the hands and arms, and runs for the door with Gerald and Fiamma following behind.

Orioli is lying buckled in the road. The Prince and the Reggies are there, Temple keening quietly. Pretini, a pair of scissors in his top pocket, has Pino’s head in his lap. Esmond kneels beside them and looks down at Pino, who attempts a smile. His spectacles are empty of glass, his eyes flooded with blood, shards sticking through in the soft red flesh.

‘Norman? Is that you? I can’t see you.’

Esmond takes his hand.

‘Norman?’

They ride with him in the ambulance, Douglas following with the Reggies in a taxi. Esmond feels he is somehow to blame, first Goad and now Orioli savaged in his presence. In the ambulance, bandages are wrapped around Orioli’s eyes. He begins to sob, calling out for his mother, and Esmond looks away into the night. He is lowered into a wheelchair at the hospital, still sobbing, and rushed into an operating room through double doors from which, two hours later, a white-coated doctor appears.

He speaks to Douglas in Italian for a while and then cups the old man’s arm with his hand, as if to show that he knows Orioli is more than a friend. With a shrug, Douglas turns to Esmond.

‘They’re taking him to Venice. There’s an expert there they think may be able to save his sight.’

He slumps down into a chair and lowers his great marble head into his hands. Fiamma crosses to put an arm around his shoulder. She whispers to him in Italian and he nods and mumbles in response. Esmond joins them.

‘You’d better stay with us,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to be alone, not after all this. He can have your father’s room can’t he, Gerald?’

‘Of course.’

Douglas is with them for three nights, a sad, sleepless figure in the house. He sits in the library, drinking all day, and out on the loggia in the evenings. They do their best to entertain him, invite him to L’Ombrellino to swim, offer to drive him over to Piccolo’s for dinner, but he declines. His face is a patchwork of bruises, and the only time they hear him speak more than a few words is when he calls the hospital in Venice to speak to Pino. One afternoon, they come home from swimming and he is gone, a polite note on the bed, two bottles of whisky missing from the cabinet in the library.

21

They haven’t seen Douglas for a week. Strindberg has gone back to Austria for a fortnight’s walking tour and Piccolo’s is boarded up. When they cycle past Davis & Orioli on the way to the woods at Lungarno Colombo, they look up at the shuttered windows on the second floor, peer through the blinds of the bookshop, hoping to catch a flash of white hair. Gerald has rung the doorbell several times without answer. They ask at Betti’s and Vieusseux’s Library, but nobody has seen him. Esmond talks of him often, of his stern eyes, the catty dazzle of his smile; ‘He’s all right!’ they mimic and laugh.

One afternoon Esmond visits the English Cemetery while Gerald and Fiamma climb the hill to swim at L’Ombrellino. He knows that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried there, and Clough, and Landor, and feels it’s a pilgrimage he should make, a way of touching the England he’s left behind. He reads in Forster that the English had once spent their Sunday afternoons strolling through the bosky graveyard, admiring the tombs by Holman Hunt and Stanhope.

It is crushingly hot in the graveyard. Weeds have grown up over the paths, some of the stones have shifted and fallen and lean on each other like ancient, lichen-covered drunks. He walks aimless diagonals across the cemetery, from the shadow of one tree to the next, trying to find Clough’s grave and remembering lines from Amours de Voyage. ‘St Peter’s disappoints me,’ he half-sings to himself, ‘Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place—’ The cemetery is stuffy with an English melancholy, prim and out of sorts with the swooning, histrionic tombs of the Italians that stretch up the hillside behind San Miniato. He leaves feeling embarrassed, parched and damp with sweat.

On the way back from the cemetery, walking down the via Laura, is Douglas. One hand taps his silver cane on the cobbles, the other holds the arm of a young girl. Esmond hurries to catch them.

‘Norman!’

Douglas turns around with an irritated sheen. His eyes soften when he sees Esmond and he attempts a smile. He looks shaky, unsteady on his feet. Little deltas of red and blue snake out from his nose and cheeks. He reaches into his pocket for a Toscano, lights it, inhales slowly.

‘Morning, Esmond. Well met. Let me present a young friend of mine, Roberta Drago. She’s all right, this one.’

The girl is perhaps eleven years old, smartly dressed with long, dark, serious hair. He gives her a little pat on the backside. She holds out a thin, gloved hand to Esmond, who shakes it.

‘We were just heading up to the gelato place by the station, care to join us?’

The girl runs ahead as Douglas takes Esmond’s arm. He can feel the occasional shudder passing through him. The old man speaks in a low, confidential voice, his breath sour with smoke.

‘It’s a miracle. Never thought I’d look at a girl again, but this one? Heavenly little thing.’ He winks at Esmond. ‘She’s run away from home, you know. This is our first trip out for a week.’

Esmond looks ahead to the girl, who now breaks into a skip across the drain covers. Douglas stumbles and clutches at his chest, breathing heavily.

‘Do you want to sit down?’

Douglas shakes his head and allows his lips to open into a damp smile.

‘One gets a little groggy at my age. If it isn’t heart, it’s liver, it’s kidneys. These doctors, I don’t know whether they’re discussing me or their breakfast.’

They eat their ices on a bench in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. A group of Fascist Youth is carrying out exercises in the square, weapons to their shoulders, black boots stamping on the paving stones. The girl runs with her ice-cream to look in the window of the perfumery on the other side of the square. Douglas watches her as his short, fleshy tongue darts out to lap at his ice.

Esmond feels suddenly nauseous and leans forward. He thinks of Fiamma and Gerald in the cool air above the city, the water on their skin. He stands. ‘Any word of Pino?’

‘He’s being operated on tomorrow in Venice. They’re hopeful.’ A pause. ‘Come and see me some time,’ Douglas says, shrugging his shoulders. ‘If you like. Bring some of your writing, perhaps. Can’t write a word myself these days. It’s no good.’

Esmond leaves him on the bench, staring towards the girl pressed against the window of the shop. He looks back at Douglas, his careful white hair, his once-handsome face now untying into papery jowls. Lawrence had described him as a fallen angel in Aaron’s Rod, Esmond remembers. Thinking himself unobserved, Douglas allows a tremor to seize hold of him. His ice-cream drops to the ground, cone-up. The girl turns back, skips across the square and sits beside him, taking his hand in hers. The two of them sit there, in the monstrous sunlight, like a long-married couple until Esmond tires of watching and heads back to the via Tornabuoni.

22

He is aware of a sound creeping into his dreams. It is the darkest heart of the night, so hot he’d left the windows and shutters open. He drags himself slowly from sleep and opens his eyes, searching the darkness until he recognises the trilling of the telephone in the library, echoing up the stone steps and into the apartment. He slips from bed, sticky and fuzzy-headed, and pads down the corridor. Gerald is standing in the doorway of his room.

‘What time is it?’ he asks, yawning.

‘Search me. Two?’

Fiamma joins them in her nightdress. It seems to Esmond that every door and window in the house has been left ajar, all of the fans turning, but there is still no air. They walk down the steps and enter the library together, the old-fashioned stick phone shrieking on a desk beside the window. Gerald crosses to pick it up.

‘Hullo. Yes. Right. Bugger. We’ll be over shortly.’

He hangs up and pinches his fingers at his forehead.

‘Bugger,’ he says.

‘What is it?’ Fiamma asks.

‘No time,’ he says, striding back towards the doorway. ‘It’s Norman, he needs us. Meet in the courtyard in five minutes.’

Wearing shorts and a linen shirt, Esmond stands in the moonlight watching moths as big as hummingbirds circle the lit windows of the apartment. Occasionally a bat swoops down to snatch one from the air. Gerald and Fiamma come down together.

‘We need a car. Norman’s in a fix and we must get him out of Florence. We could head up to L’Ombrellino and borrow George’s but it’s a hell of a way.’

Esmond pats his pocket.

‘I’ve got the keys to the church. Father Bailey keeps his Alfa in the garage at the back. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. If it’s an emergency, I mean.’

They cross the Ponte Santa Trinità, then down the via Maggio, past the sleeping birdcages and quietly through the wicket gate of the church, tiptoeing along a passageway and into the garage. The room is full of half-assembled engines, bicycles without wheels, a pony trap resting on its haunches. Esmond slides open the doors which give onto the Piazza Santo Spirito. The square is empty, cardboard boxes by the roadside for the dustbin men, a small pyramid of wine bottles leaking onto the earth outside a bar.

The key is in the ignition. Esmond sits beside Gerald in the front while Fiamma squeezes into the seats at the back. The engine starts with a roar that makes them all jump.

‘I haven’t driven in a while,’ Gerald shouts over the noise.

As they edge out into the square, Esmond looks back to see that a light has come on in the apartments next to the church. He thinks he sees Bailey outlined in the window, looking at them. They pull through the square and through the silent streets of the Oltrarno, along the south side of the river. Moonlight has turned the city to bone. Finally, they drive across the cobbles of the Ponte alle Grazie and pull up outside Davis & Orioli.

Douglas steps from the shadows of the alleyway beside the shop. He is wearing a lady’s straw sunhat and a neckerchief pulled up over his face like an outlaw. He carries a small pigskin travelling case and looks nervously up and down the road. The tremors that Esmond had seen outside Santa Maria Novella now cause the old man to quiver like a mystic, surprised by the truthfulness of his vision. Esmond climbs over to sit alongside Fiamma while Douglas sinks down beside Gerald in front.

‘Where do we go?’ Gerald asks.

‘Pisa,’ Douglas says, pulling the neckerchief down around his neck and clamping the hat on his head with one hand. ‘One of Pino’s friends will put me up for a few nights. Then they’ll bung me in the back of a lorry to Menton. It’s all part of the game, isn’t it? What I always say. Everything’s interesting. All right!’

Gerald turns the car back towards the bridge, through the Oltrarno and past the basilica of San Frediano. Soon they are on the viale Etruria and moving at a smart pace through dark hills, shadow-clad cypresses rising and falling beside them with the swell and sink of the land. Douglas turns round to speak to Esmond, the red coal of a Toscano glowing at his lips.

‘Filly you spotted me with earlier,’ he says, raising his voice over the wind. ‘Turns out her father is a Centurione in the MVSN. Someone saw us walking back from our gelato.’ He rolls his eyes at Esmond. ‘Knew I shouldn’t have let her out of the house.’

Fiamma’s hair is streaming out behind her and Esmond grows cold as they hit fifty miles per hour on the empty road. There is a tartan rug on the floor and he pulls it over their laps and puts his arm around her shoulders. She nestles her head in the crook of his neck and closes her eyes.

‘Probably a good thing,’ Douglas says, throwing his cigarillo into the night and forcing the hat down with both hands. ‘Needed to get moving. Can’t stop in one place for too long. Florence is a drag without Pino. I haven’t been able to write for weeks.’ He prods at the bag in his lap. ‘Latest book. Cultural history of Paphian love. Start off with the Greeks. Theognis, Solon, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Ibycus. Know any of them?’ He doesn’t seem to expect a reply. ‘Magnificent stuff. Meeting the girl caused a blockage. Good to be shot of her.’

It is as they are passing the lights of Empoli to the north that Esmond is first aware of the cars behind them. There is, before anything, a sense that they are being followed. Then, coming up very fast out of the darkness, two sets of headlights. Soon their engines are audible even over the growl of the Alfa and the rush of air. They are moving up into hill country around San Miniato. The car shudders as they accelerate up a long, steep incline. Fiamma looks back, her hand held to her eyes as if shading them against sunlight.

‘The cars,’ she says.

‘I’ve seen them,’ Gerald replies, putting his foot down. ‘Bugger.’

They have reached the crest of the hill and are now coasting into the valley. For the moment the cars are out of sight and Esmond hugs Fiamma to him. He can see that Douglas is shuddering in the front seat, his arms on the dashboard, his head on his arms.

‘Pull yourself together, Norman,’ Gerald says. ‘I’ll need you to navigate once we hit Pisa.’

The Alfa seems to skim the surface of the road, riding the trail of moonlight before them. Gerald drives with one hand, his elbow on the windowsill, a cigarette between his lips. Fiamma is sleeping, breathing softly into the hollow of his neck.

‘I’m sorry, you chaps,’ Douglas says quietly, barely audible to Esmond. ‘It seems I can’t help myself. You see I still think of myself as your age, hale and hot-blooded. Shocks me to look in the mirror sometimes. Expect to see a strapping young bounder and instead—’ He turns to Esmond with grey eyes, swinging jowls. ‘I’d have liked to die in Italy, but France won’t be so bad.’ He begins to sing. ‘It’ll all be the same in a hundred years.’

Villages appear and vanish, dark and dreamlike. Douglas smokes constantly, throwing the stubs of his Toscanos out into the air. Esmond leans back and looks at the moon, remembers floating in the pool at Emmanuel with Philip. He takes a deep breath and feels Fiamma stirring against him. ‘Where are we?’ she asks sleepily.

The engine begins to sputter around Pontedera. At first a wheeze, then a definite cough. There has been no sign of the pursuing cars for half an hour or so, and they are approaching the turn-off for Pisa. Now the Alfa begins to bark and a cloud of blue smoke plumes out behind them.

‘What’s wrong?’ Esmond asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Gerald says. ‘We have a quarter tank of petrol, so it can’t be that.’ There is a thud from the engine and the car shudders. Gerald slows and pulls over. ‘I know nothing about cars,’ he says, getting out and walking round to open the bonnet. ‘Bugger. It’s hot.’

After a few minutes, a throb of engines is audible in the distance. Esmond looks back towards Florence and sees the first faint brightening of the horizon at the end of a long stretch of road. It is quarter to five by his watch. He gets out and goes to stand at the open bonnet of the car. Fine steam is rising from the engine. Gerald pulls his hand inside the sleeve of his jacket to unfasten the radiator cap.

‘It’s the water, I think,’ says Gerald. ‘Look in there.’

Esmond looks. The tank is empty. The roar of engines is closer and, looking back down, he can make out that the cars are Fiats, in procession, coming out of the sky to the east.

‘Let me see if there’s anything in the back.’

He opens the boot and finds only a small can of petrol, a few maps. ‘Nothing,’ he says. Douglas is staring backwards, down the road to where the Fiats are, closer now, their rumble building with each turn. ‘Piss in it,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Piss in the tank. Always works. Had a Siddeley Special Six back in Blighty. Was forever blowing up. Piss, I tell you.’

‘Are you sure?’ Gerald asks, looking at Esmond. He shrugs and closes the boot. They stand, side by side, cocks out, watching the Fiats approach. Esmond whistles, trying to drown out the sound of the engines. Gerald is the first to send down a heavy stream onto the hot metal, splashing and fizzing around the mouth of the radiator tank. Esmond follows shortly after. Fiamma has her hand to her mouth. Douglas is watching around the side of the raised bonnet. They finish, shake and leap inside the car. Gerald turns the key in the ignition.

The Fiats have pulled abreast of one another and are perhaps two hundred yards away. Blackshirts lean from the windows of each car and Esmond can see revolvers in their hands; one of them carries a shotgun that he waves from side to side like a baton. The Alfa’s engine turns over, fails. The sun has begun to rise behind them as the cars close in. The engine turns over again and fires a plume from the exhaust. Gerald stamps on the accelerator and, with a spray of pebbles, they pull away.

The Fiats are yards behind them. The Alfa is heading up a slope towards a coppice, harried by the two cars. The sun appears above the dark mass of the Sienese Clavey and light floods the plain, pouring down like water from the peaks. There is a sound like a sharp intake of breath followed by a high whistle. Esmond looks back at the cars and, as he does, there is another whistle and the front windscreen of the Alfa shatters, sending shards of glass splintering over hands and faces. He can see that Douglas is badly cut: a wide gash has opened above one eye, his cheeks flecked with blood. The old man sinks down, trying to curl into the footwell, shivering and sobbing.

Bullets ping off the bodywork of the car, fizz overhead, explode in the tarmac on the road beside them. The Blackshirts shout and one of the cars pulls alongside the Alfa. Esmond looks over and sees Carità at the wheel, a snub pistol in one hand, the white tuft in his quiff fluttering in the wind. He grins eagerly and steers the Fiat into the side of the Alfa. There is a crunch of bent metal, a shudder as the two cars scour and then the Alfa lurches on. Carità is standing up in his seat, steering with one hand and popping at them with his Beretta. Esmond puts his arm around Fiamma and hauls her down into the cramped space behind the front seats, pulling the tartan rug across their backs. Fiamma is moaning quietly, her cheek pressed against his in the rumbling darkness, her breath in quick pants.

‘Fascist bastards,’ she mumbles.

They are down there for what seems like hours. Esmond thinks of trips to London with his parents as a child, when Anna and he would curl up in the back seat of the car as their father drove the Lagonda home to Aston. He remembers the feeling of weightlessness, the sense of flying through the night as they snuggled under blankets, his sister’s head on his shoulder. And then, pulling into the gravel of the house’s turning circle, he would pretend to be asleep so that his father would have to carry him from the car, hauling him over his shoulder like a fireman and gripping him with his good arm until he laid him out on the bed, helped him from his clothes and smoothed his hair.

The car slows. He hears Gerald and Norman speaking and lifts himself carefully onto the seat. They are coming into the outskirts of Pisa. There are other cars on the street, a bus taking workers to their offices, but no sign of the Fiats. The car is covered in scratches and pocks. A few pieces of glass hang tremblingly from the metal frame of the windscreen. Gerald and Douglas are ashen, their hair clumped with blood, their mouths and teeth stained with it.

‘Turn here,’ Douglas says. ‘Now there. On the left.’

They make their way through a gateway into the courtyard of a long house. Gerald brings the car to a halt and turns off the engine. There is a mulberry tree in the centre of the yard with a car parked beneath it. Gerald begins to laugh.

‘Christ. I mean, Norman, bugger. I thought we were goners. What in God’s name are we going to tell the priest about his car?’

Douglas begins to laugh, too, and Esmond joins him, reaching down to draw back the blanket from where Fiamma is crouched in a terrified huddle on the floor, her face pressed into Gerald’s seat.

‘You can come out now,’ he says. ‘We’re safe. We’re all safe.’

He leans down to help her, reaching behind her head. He feels wetness.

‘Fiamma?’ he says, with a sudden lurch in his chest. ‘Fiamma?’ He turns her over and sees the whiteness of her face, the dark red, almost black pool formed beneath her. Gerald has turned and looks down at the girl now stretched out on the seat as Esmond searches her neck for a pulse.

‘What do we do?’ Esmond asks, looking first at Gerald and then at Douglas. She is not breathing, there is no heartbeat, just a small hole in the nape of her neck through which blood is seeping in a slow trickle. Esmond reaches round and puts his finger into the hole, but there is little blood left, and he prods through to tendons, wet gristle. His mind feels as if it has lost its surface, its ability to grasp hold of the car, the dusty courtyard, Douglas or Gerald. It is all depths, horror, and he lowers himself down to lie against her frail, sunken body.

Douglas turns to get out of the car.

‘I can’t have anything to do with this,’ he says. ‘After everything else. They’d kill me.’ He backs away towards the house, leaving the boys with the body of their friend. They hear a door slam, the sound of conversation. Douglas comes out of the house followed by a small man with yellowed hair and thick-rimmed spectacles. They get into a Topolino parked underneath the mulberry tree. Neither of them looks at the Alfa or its contents as they pass.

Esmond presses himself against Fiamma’s chest, Gerald reaches over to stroke her blood-matted hair. They stay like this for a long time as the city wakes around them and, even in the warmth of the morning, her body is so cold that Esmond begins to shudder. Gerald is crying and the tears clear furrows in the blood on his cheeks. Someone in the house turns a radio on and there is the sound of a ukulele. The voices of the Trio Lescano seep out into the still air of the courtyard. Finally, hopelessly, Esmond turns to Gerald and asks again, ‘What do we do now?’